About

A surreal glitch on a journey to somewhere.

I’m Elisa. I work under the name divinegrackle.

I have four children. I am a stay-at-home mother. Painting is not a career so much as the place the pictures go. When I am not at a canvas I am usually in the kitchen or the garden.

I have made pictures since I could write. In high school I fell for the Impressionists in an arts and humanities class, spent as much time as I could in art rooms, and went through a gifted-and-talented program. None of that was formal studio training. I am still self-taught. I experiment until a medium does what I need.

Painting became serious in 2021, after my divorce. I needed a place for thoughts and feelings that would not stay in language. The images arrived already formed. I put them on the canvas with almost no sketch, which is why the early work has restless, restated lines. I can hold an entire painting in my head and work on it there before anything exists in the room. Sometimes the canvas still refuses the picture I planned, and I revise in paint. Lately I try to be more deliberate — sketchbook, then drawing on the canvas, then color — but I still edit while I work, because the symbols keep arriving and the meaning of a piece can change underneath my hand.

A wine-and-painting night with friends pulled me back into acrylic. Decoupage is the most physical of the methods I use: I sketch the image, tear or cut tissue, and set it with Mod Podge. There is no correct technique for how I do it. It is just absorbing enough to quiet the rest of the day. Gouache I like because it is more forgiving than watercolor and slower than acrylic. I hope to try oil, though I am not sure I have the patience to live with one picture that long. I usually want the piece finished so I can begin the next one.

In March of 2024 I painted every day for about a month. Die Jägerina, Bloom! Headshot, and Spring Water come from that stretch. They were not planned as a series. Each one was a quick sketch on the canvas, painted the same day, and they are still some of my favorite pieces.

Divine, in the name, comes from Harris Glenn Milstead, the actor who performed under that name in John Waters’ films. Grackle comes from the great-tailed grackles in Austin — birds that look like they belong in a myth and behave like they own the parking lot.

The figure I return to is a matte-black rabbit girl I call Puella. She entered the work as an astronaut mermaid and, over time, grew legs. Around her I keep using hermetic alchemy, quantum physics, technology, tarot, and mythology. I am a Gnostic Christian. I like to learn. For years I thought about Nothing — which is not empty, and is really something — and that long argument with absence became The Onion.

I was born in Las Vegas in 1984. My parents worked for the government, so the household moved. I spent fourteen years in Idaho, then went to Vilseck, Germany, in 1997 for high school, transferred to Mannheim as a sophomore, and graduated there in 2002. After graduation I lived in Paris for a year with a friend. In 2003 I moved to Kansas to live with my parents, started at Kansas State University, and stayed until 2010. There was a brief stretch in Salt Lake City, then Austin from 2011 to 2023. I am in Washington now, for the time being. I do not know where I will be next.

There were computers in the house early. The first one I remember is an Amiga, in 1988. Lemmings was the game I loved on it.

Separately, I collect Euro-style board games — Ricochet Robots, Indonesia, The Gallerist, Kanban, Puerto Rico — and I keep a profile on BoardGameGeek as Figgyroo. Bouncy Bunnies is my version of Ricochet Robots.

I do not take commissions. I paint what arrives. Sales of original work are on hold; I am not ready to part with most of what is here. When I have sold paintings, I have sold them in Dogecoin. I care about that chain as a proof-of-work layer one, and I wanted the work to give it a use beyond speculation. Viva Doge comes from the same place. If there is interest, I may offer prints of some of the originals.

I used to have a large presence on X. The account was permanently suspended for “inauthentic behavior,” which I take as a bad joke and a bad call. I will not open a new one on principle. If the old account is restored — and it may be; the ban was wrong — I will go back. Until then I am here, and on the other places linked from Elsewhere.