If you think about it, art covers a whole multitude of things, including painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, design, creations, installations, music, poetry...  

So what defines something as an artwork?  If a photograph can be an artwork, are all photos? 

I can't find a definitive answer to this, but my belief is that if you regard something you've done to be worth something (even a smile or a thought) and want to share it, then that makes it a piece of art.  From our very earliest days, art has been a way of communicating and it still is.

To highlight this, the image above is a photograph I took of some branches that had fallen to the floor and were in the process of decaying gracefully, into the mulch beneath them.  A great example of the Circle of Life.  It's something you could walk by multiple times without giving even a thought to it, and yet here is a declining life, now giving new life to tiny ecosystems that will grow and support bigger ones. This is something I wanted to share, and so it's a piece of artwork, even before I abstracted it.

By highlighting individual parts of the branches, I wanted to make people look at it in a different way.  I can leave the viewer to decipher their own meaning, but on this occasion I have chosen to share my thought process.