Master Year

With Master Year, Riet Van Lysebettens presents a wide range of books and works in various formats. Drawing on a selection from the past year, she lays out her creative journey.

RIET VAN LYSEBETTENS

I’d been looking forward to my final year for so long. It turned out to be a season packed with a whole series of episodes. There was no shortage of ideas; I already had a few that I hadn’t got round to before. During the first semester, I did an internship as a graphic designer at the publishing house Borgerhoff & Lamberigts. During that time I came up with a host of new projects.

One of the works I’d already had in mind last year was Tzatziki War. Across two books, they describe the little wars fought at the kitchen table. In the first, the main character is stuck at the table.

In the second, he breaks free and seeks out his own rules. I began the publications with an epigraph by Sun Tzu, a famous general who is now mainly quoted in management courses. I knew straight away that each book had to take the form of a menu and that I wanted to draw toy soldiers. I then filled in the rest associatively.

I saw the publication Cluedo as a sort of concept album, similar to those of the music world. That idea came to me when I heard toddler techno on television in Germany. I wrote little verses, rhyming texts. From the game Cluedo, I borrowed the structure person + place + object.

Henrietta in Manhattan is leading the race,
She’s got metal boules and a look on her face.

I’ve made images to go with each text. I’m moving to New York at the end of October. I don’t yet know what I'm going to do there. So the bonus track will be: me with a set of petanque balls and a look on my face.

As I focused on printmaking, I used a watercolour monotype here. Its softness contrasts nicely with the text, which is a bit harsher. I always look for a specific technique for each project. It’s not as though I think: ‘I’m good at painting with acrylics, so I’m going to paint everything in acrylics.’ Even though that would make things easier for me.

Before I started studying printmaking, I completed a bachelor’s degree in teaching. The focus was on biology and art education. After those three years, I was eager to draw more. Initially, I there­fore thought about studying illustration. However, after the first foundation year in graphic design, I opted for the wide range of possibilities offered by printmaking. In the second year, I chose a minor in illustration. My mentor, Martha Verschaffel, is also a teacher for that course. And then, as I mentioned, I did my work placement as a graphic designer.

In printmaking, we studied techniques involving very specific processes. If you occasionally skip a step or approach the work differently, you can quickly adapt them to suit your own style. For example, I used typical viscous printing ink to create mono­types. They look exactly like oil paintings. The ink might well flake off within five years, but that’s part of the experiment.

For MAP, I made a work for the floor. Frilly Blouse Syndrome was inspired by Linda Nochlin’s essay Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? (1971), in which she questioned the visibility of women within art history. For the exhibition, I created a starter pack featuring the 19^th-century artist Rosa Bonheur. Passers-by literally walked right over the female artist.

This is a series of meaningless leaflets, such as ‘How to eat soup during a crisis’ or ‘Instructions for a Tuesday’. There’s often humour in what I create, but you have to get it. To me, my work is sometimes very funny, although I can imagine that for most viewers it doesn’t land at all. That said, my jokes are never meant to be offensive — I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.

In this series, I used the same images ten times, always in a different order. I gave each publication a different title: Marguerite, The Worm, Pardon, Static, I am withering, Cup of Ambition, As usual, Over and Over, The Most Amazing, (I sat with my Anger). They illustrate how the sequence of events influences your impression of them.

My dad does genealogy. That’s how we discovered that we’re related to Jean-Antoine Watteau, a famous Rococo painter. He was the brother of my great-great-[…]-great-grandfather, many generations ago — my only “claim to nepotism”. The work Collective Sigh borrows figures from his paintings and presents them as statues. As Watteau is family, it felt OK to recontextualise his characters, including his beloved Pierrot.

The starting point for The Most Romantic Volcanoes was the 19th-century notion of destruction as the ultimate form of beauty. Take, for example, the Tambora eruption, which influenced the paintings of William Turner. I investigated which volcanoes are mentioned most frequently in literature. I reproduced these, with captions featuring the key words most commonly used to describe them.

The last publication is more personal. It documents a walk through my home. I zoom in to look at things in a completely different way. In each room, I highlight a single object. And I add short sentences that describe actions in a very detached way. As I’m about to leave for New York, this is my way of saying goodbye to my place.

Henrietta in Manhattan is leading the race,
She’s got metal boules and a look on her face.