Ghetto Bear Stare

Oakland native artist Lisa Pisa, fell in love with art since her childhood days of drawing Garfield and Ninja Turtles. Lisa, whose father is French and mother is Japanese, believes that her culturally diverse upbringing influenced her creatively unique style of art. Growing up, Lisa collected records, unusual trinkets, and other items that she was able to incorporate into her artwork. However, her deepest passion lies in using mixed media and hip-hop in her artwork. Lisa earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from California State University, East Bay and then spent some time in Kagoshima, Japan to further explore her cultural roots and find more inspiration for her art. Since her return from Japan in 2010, she has been involved in several art shows and gallery openings, including Chopsticks Urban Art Space and Loakal Gallery in Oakland, as well as, Gauntlet Gallery and 111 Minna Gallery in San Francisco. In addition to creating artwork for galleries, Lisa is a full-time sign artist and also paints at live art events around the Bay Area. She believes that it’s important to not over think her creations in order to capture “the moment” and have fun. Giclée (pronounced "zhee-clay") is a neologism for the process of making fine art prints from a digital source using ink-jet printing. The word "giclée" is derived from the French language word "le gicleur" meaning "nozzle", or more specifically "gicler" meaning "to squirt, spurt, or spray". It was coined in 1991 by Jack Duganne, a printmaker working in the field, to represent any inkjet-based digital print used as fine art. The intent of that name was to distinguish commonly known industrial "Iris proofs" from the type of fine art prints artists were producing on those same types of printers. The name was originally applied to fine art prints created on Iris printers in a process invented in the early 1990s but has since come to mean any high quality ink-jet print and is often used in galleries and print shops to denote such prints.