Who's Who in El Cerrito: Lisa Wu

Name: Lisa Wu

Age: 41

Occupation: Software engineer, artist

How long have you lived here? 13 years

What brought you to El Cerrito? I went to college at Cal and I work in Marin. For the longest time I lived in Novato and there's nothing there, so I wanted to live over here. Berkeley's kind of expensive, Albany's expensive. El Cerrito was affordable, at the time.

Have you been happy with your decision to move here? Yes, I love it here.

Are you involved in the local arts community? I was in the El Cerrito Art Association for a year. For the art show I did some of that stuff, I attended some of the meetings.

When I attended those meetings I was feeling out of place with everybody who has all this time on their hands to do painting, and I was sitting there thinking, "I don't have time to do this, I wish I did, I'll come back when I'm retired."

Describe your art work. For a while I was doing a variety of things. I was doing watercolors, I was doing acrylics and then ceramics. That is what I'm focusing on these days because it can take so many forms. You can do it in three dimensions, you can do it on a wheel, you can hand-build it, and then when people buy it they can use it instead of just having it hang on the wall.

When you're doing ceramics you have a variety of clays that you can try out, like porcelain, stoneware and all kinds of stuff. Then you have all of the equipment and it just becomes this process that you're involved in. At the end, after you fire it, every time you open the kiln it's like Christmas because you never know what happens in that kiln. When things turn out, it's always a surprise, and when they don't, it's like, ok, lesson learned, don't do that.

Do you find that your art work is a good counterpoint to your work? It definitely is. I was just telling my husband the other night – because lately I've been working on the wheel for days — that I'm not centered mentally, the pieces come out kind of wobbly no matter what I do. On days that I'm actually centered, the pieces come out perfect.

I don't really strive to be a perfectionist when it comes to ceramics because that's not my style, and if it was I probably wouldn't finish anything. Days when I'm at work and there are too many meetings or I'm too stressed out, I just go into my studio and work on some stuff. It takes me away from that daily grind that sucks the life out of us.