More than one person has told me that every great artist makes the same artwork over and over again throughout the course of their lives. Some days I agree with this, others not. But when I come across an artist who really does seem to make the same image again and again over the course of their career, I think about this injunction. Sometimes when you come across these artists, you think that maybe it isn’t a good thing to repeat oneself. Sometimes when you come across these artists, you think it is.
Robin Schwartz falls in the latter category. I like her repetition; it works. Maybe it works for a very particular reason though, because her subject material is fairly specific. The image that she has made over and over and over and over again, is of her daughter interacting with a variety of different animals. It's such distinct, almost formulaic subject material, and in a way so ordinary, that maybe it’s the kind of situation in which the goal of the artwork is to discover the thousands of ways to look at the same thing. I think this is ultimately what makes me like her work, something that exists almost outside of the work, or outside the experience of looking at her work: it forces me to think about all of the different ways that an artist can look at the same thing thousands of times, and see something new with each glance.
-Eugenie Dalland