A picture is worth a thousands words.

“A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver,” says Proverbs 25:11. Hand-painted was the only way until Nikon, Kodak, Polaroid, Kodachrome, Canon and selfies. From the Latin, pictura, to paint, it brings to mind images of all the famous pictures you have seen in person in your walk on earth so far. Many leave an image impressed deeply in your mind and soul .

Before the days of digital enhancement, you could pretty well believe what you saw in a picture. The camera lens captured reality. No fake pictures please. Can you believe we lived without Facebook and Instagram? Just push delete. Why don’t they photoshop all the great master works to make them better? Or, are they perfect already? Duh!

Don’t try to change somebody’s freedom of expression. Pictures come in motion books, tubes, puzzles and windows. They can occupy a lot of your time just looking at all those famous ones on museum walls. Or, you can create your own. If you can still find a way, all you need is paper and a pencil, but what do you draw?

A mental picture is something the internet has yet to produce.

Who can erase the image of lily pads under Monet’s bridge, church steeples with flowering pink dogwoods in the foreground, crinoline petticoats with iced sugar cookies, blue skies over an outfield or a golf course, anything pretty enough to be on the cover of Ideals magazine. You get the picture. You can’t have too many pictures. Change them out by season or put them on the ceilings.

A good rule of thumb is to hang it so the middle of the picture is at eye level. If you double hang, put the larger one on top. In a gallery setting, you can line up all the bottom edges on a line.

A print is just that. It’s worth the paper it’s printed on, unlike some things. Confederate money is almost worth face value to collectors these days. A Remarque is a print that the artist had added to. Block prints are done by hand as witness the Holtzman collection, now on view.

An artist-signed original is still your best bet, hands down. With the ever-which-way Michael at Kinko’s, it’s hard to know “is it real or is it memorex?” We’ve come a long way from the Kopykat on West Innes, behind Pockets. Careful, you can spend more money on the frame than the picture.

There is only one “original” — from Latin, to rise or begin. Some people are called originals. They are impossible to frame. Even all Yankees don’t fit the same mold. Then, there’s the expression “never had an original thought.”

You might check any blog to prove this truism.

Original manuscripts, plays, compositions, poems, music and masterworks of art are waiting to be written — wonderful, witty wise, well-done and winsome. Why would you want to copy everybody else and become addicted to the same thing that you can’t get enough of to the point of an “overdose” to the edge of life itself?

How can we not “paint a bad picture of what we see around us? We can’t just sit idly by and pretend we don’t see what it is doing to our young, creative, talented youth.

“Then ye shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you and destroy all their pictures, and all their molten images and quite pluck down all their high places,” says Numbers 33:52. Are we doomed according to what we hang in a place of honor?

Rather, look for the picturesque in your world. Make your own art and get it framed and show-cased for the future, no matter how insignificant it is. Even underwear can be art, if you take it the wrong way.

“Liar, liar pants on fire. Hang ‘em high, hang ‘em low, hang ‘em in the picture shows.”

Nine-hundred-ninety-nine. One thousand.

Clyde lives in Salisbury.