Drawing by my friend

Hello to all my creative art loving friends! I hope you are doing well!

Beautiful drawing, right?! I didn't draw this. This was drawn by a good friend of mine who is older than me and I really appreciate her. She was the one who inspired me to start drawing too. This painting was actually given to me by her daughter.

I was very pleased. But there was one moment that prevented me from admiring this picture. This is that the side part of the canvas was not painted.

It didn't look very neat and I wanted to fix it. True, for a long time I did not dare to do this. It seemed to me that it would be disrespectful to the artist to add something to his work. But then I decided to fix it.

Now the picture looks simply incomparable to my taste.

The question I raise in this post of mine concerns not so much creativity as ethics. How ethical are such actions? If we assume the picture was painted by another artist and at the moment it belongs to me, then how ethical is it for me to change anything in this picture to my liking? Wouldn't this look like disrespect for the artist himself? What do you think about this?
(all photos are taken by me)

Take care of yourself and be healthy!