Cape May's Creative Pioneer: An Interview with Victor Grasso

Join me as I chat with Victor Grasso, the visionary behind Cape May’s Jawbone Gallery. We explore art, inspiration, and carving your own path in the creative world. Don't miss this inspiring conversation! 🎙️ #ArtTalk #CreativeJourney #TheWaterTrough

Transcript

Ed Drozda 0:10

Welcome to The Water Trough where we can't make you drink, but we will make you think. My name is Ed Drozda, The Small Business Doctor, and I'm really excited you chose to join me here as we discuss topics that are important for small business folks just like you. If you're looking for ideas, inspiration, and possibility, you've come to the right place. Join us as we take steps to help you create the healthy business that you've always wanted. Welcome back to The Water Trough folks. This is Ed Drozda, The Small Business Doctor. Today I am joined by Victor Grosso. Victor is a contemporary fine artist, gallery owner, a family man, and an entrepreneur. He's charted a bold course for Cape May New Jersey's cultural landscape. Through his Jawbone Gallery, he's introduced new and compelling ways to experience art, presenting work that is cutting edge in vision, yet firmly rooted in the academic traditions of master painters and sculptors. As an artist, Grasso's practices are narrative-driven and symbol-rich, often drawing from maritime lore, myth, natural history, and the charged tension between beauty and danger. Equally committed to community as he is to his craft, Grasso has positioned Cape May as a destination for serious collectors and adventurous viewers alike, bridging coastal heritage with a broader contemporary dialogue. His vision honors tradition while insisting on evolution, proving that the rigor of dedication to craft and imaginative risk are not opposites, but partners in the making of enduring art. Victor, welcome.

Victor Grasso 2:05

Thanks for having me, Ed.

Ed Drozda 2:06

I'm really excited to have you here. I'm fascinated that you're self-taught. When I look at your work, I can't imagine what it would take to get to the space that you're at. Tell us about your journey from a young child in the world of art to where you are today.

Victor Grasso 2:26

Of course, and it's funny that you say self-taught. That is a very broad statement, and I'll get into it more, but you know, you learn from people along the way. You learn from your life experience, you learn from looking, observing, all these things. And I think that you can only learn so much by training and academically. It's when you get your own voice, your own vision, you're teaching yourself that anyway. So my journey began as a love of art. Art has been in my life from day one. My mother painted. My grandfather was a sculptor, his father was a painter, my great-grandfather. It was on both sides, everybody did it and everybody was very good, very disciplined and good in their own way, but no one did it professionally. No one made a living at it. I was the first person to do that. I think that a lot of my youth and imagination was, I was an only child, divorced parents, and it was definitely my escape to just sit and draw all the time. I had an early love of Renaissance from my grandfather who was a sculptor. He just loved the Renaissance. He also had a love for Africa, African masks, African art, and Picasso. I was introduced to so many things at a very young age. But the main thing for me was comic books, and to this day love comic book artists. I think they are the true storytellers of the world today. It's a pure thing, basically mind to hand. It's truly imaginative, which I find so many things in my journey that was locally presented as art was just unimaginative to me. All that I wanted to do as a child was be a comic book artist, and I would just draw for hours and hours. No one in my family had gone to college, and right out of high school I got a job. There was a lot of new casinos construction going on in Atlantic City, and they were putting murals in them left and right. The father of a friend of mine, a union painter, met this guy from Michigan who had a mural company. He did like 150 murals in Trump's World's Fair. He decided after that he was gonna stay and open a company, and he was looking for employees. So I walked in with a bunch of drawings and this guy hired me. I was 18 years old, and right off the bat I was getting paid to paint. I had never painted before other than a few little messing around kind of things. That was the start of my professional career as an artist, but I knew that it was not the be all, end all. It was really apparent that I was not interested in painting for other people, but I was an 18-year-old kid who grew up in Sea Isle City, New Jersey, about the farthest thing away from the New York art scene, even though it was only two hours away. I did have an all or nothing kind of drive, I'm gonna do what I wanna do, and I'm gonna make it happen where I am, because I'm really a homebody, and I don't like venturing out. Like I said, I lived through my drawings and through these stories like that I would create in the comic books and stuff. But anyway, I took a knack to painting and I was getting paid well to paint big giant paintings, which also really took away the fear of painting large, because some of these things were a hundred feet long,

5:45

hundred feet long, fifty feet high,

Victor Grasso 5:48

gigantic murals. There was a team of about five of us. I was working with a gentleman who was in a Russian art guild from the time he was two years old. I was working with guys from Korea who were gifted painters, old billboard painters who were masters of their craft, and I was a sponge. I was just taking it all in. But again, I knew I wasn't really interested in painting for other people. It really is not a true creative, it conflicts with that because constantly playing cover tunes if you're in a band, you know? But I knew I had to do it. So I was always working on my own things in secret or before hours. And when I was 21 years old, I had a art show at a gallery in Ocean City and nothing sold. It was way out of place for the gallery. But it was fine. It got me a taste of what it's like to have a bunch of people come in and talk to you about your art and be the center of attention for a minute. And also have people say what is this shit, which you need as well. There was a lot of butting heads at the mural company and everybody left except for me'cause I was the youngest and I didn't really know what my next step is, but I started doing my own murals on the side and I was doing much more residential. I did not have the ability or credentials to be dealing with CEOs of casinos and stuff. So I was doing more residential murals and every time I got one, I mean God, Ed, it was like one Tuscan vineyard scene after another, which is just so brilliant in South Jersey, painting this in people's kitchens, it's ridiculous, but it's what people wanted at the time. But what I would try to do say, hey why don't you let me put you in there, incorporate it, and that's when I started honing my craft on portraits. Before I knew it I left the mural company and opened up my own company. I did one giant mural in the entrance of Ocean City; no longer exists, but that was my first real taste of doing large, doing business on my own commercial, outdoor business. But again, dealing with boards and people who have opinions and you know, it's the age old adage, as soon as the suits get involved with the vision of the artist, it goes wrong. So you do it until you don't have to do it anymore. And that's what I did. I really moved towards doing portraits and I did many portraits for many years, as well as commissions. I would take any commission that I could get because I didn't want to get a real job. I was an artist and I've always been an artist, and there was no question that that's what I was gonna do. Around my late twenties, I started getting serious about my vision as what I wanted to produce as my own art. I would do a commission or work on something for eight, nine hours a day. Then I would come home and I would work on my own thing. So I was painting for 16 to 20 hours a day for almost 20 years, and if I wasn't painting or drawing I was in a museum or in a gallery looking at the Masters, looking at people I admired, trying to figure out how they did it. During that time I also hooked up with a friend of mine, Sam Donovan, who worked at the mural company and left very early. He was a brilliant painter, a billboard painter, in Philadelphia, and he became my mentor. When I left the mural company I really didn't know what I was doing and anytime he had a big commission, like a big giant mural, I would help him. He really did guide me through my mid to late twenties. He saved my career'cause after I left the mural company it was really hard and the commissions weren't coming all the time. But he would have me come over to his studio and I would help him, and I learned a tremendous amount. Later I helped him get into Soma Gallery and it was a good give and take. Unfortunately, last year he passed away, but he was a wonderful man and he taught me a lot. Then I came to Cape May and I met Jack Wright. Jack produces a wonderful magazine, Exit Zero, and he was doing these color covers once a year, and after chatting and becoming friends he gave me a shot at doing one. I painted my wife on the lawn of Congress Hall in a wedding dress with a hose, people went bonkers for it. We ended up doing covers for like five or six years. It really cemented me as a name in Cape May. Soma Gallery opened in Cape May right after the first year and I jumped on that. Cape May is becoming really cool, and I've got a name with Exit Zero. I've got my commissions that I can make money from, so I'm just gonna paint whatever I want. Within the next couple of years I pushed boundaries and pushed myself to create pieces that were incredibly detailed, and driven by a lot of time and effort, and put all of myself into them. I also had the incredible hubris to put ridiculous prices on these things. The next thing I knew they were selling, but I always looked at myself as this is what this is worth. With the advent of social media I was able to meet contemporaries and the next thing I knew I was showing in New York, Philadelphia and Denmark, and being represented by galleries, but still keeping a strong tie to Cape May. Then Soma Gallery closed during COVID and everything was kind of up in the air. Then, a couple years later the space opened and I opened up Jawbone Gallery, still painting constantly, creating my own shows, and doing my own thing here in Cape May as well to bring in some amazing talent, vision, and art to Cape May. The clientele and the mindset is here, the acceptance of vision, the art crowd, there's just so many. It's worldwide now, so it's right for a real art gallery, real art. Sorry if that was a little bit long.

Ed Drozda 11:38

Oh, no, no. I asked you an open-minded, open headed question, and I appreciate you sharing your journey. One of the things about Cape May as I see it, is that at its core it's conservative. You said when you came to Cape May you pushed back. Were you pushing back against what I perceive as conservatism or maybe something else? No, I don't ever look at anything as conservatively or, I mean certainly I don't get into politics with my art. It's never been my... I'm sorry, I didn't mean politics conservatism. That wasn't my point. I don't wanna go there either. No, like a conservative vision. I grew up on the shore. Any art gallery that I saw showed beach paintings, the beach umbrellas, the snow fences, no faces, maybe people sitting on the beach. And there was nothing that interested me at all. I was interested in Frankie Frazetta who did all the book covers in the sixties, created Conan and the look of Conan and sword, sorcery, and fantasy. And I was interested in painters like Charlemagne, who painted the Moorish Chief, which is my favorite painting in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. And I was interested in Caravaggio, who was brought to life by using real models in the Baroque period and showed just how bleak and dark real life can be. These were things that interested me, but I lived here and I wasn't planning on going to big cities at the time and stuff. So I was just like there's no reason why you can't make what you wanna make here, it's just a matter of whether someone is interested or not. And Cape May had an audience that I think was open to looking at things. I don't see Cape May anywhere near as conservative as the other islands, at least when I was growing up. So, my thing was pushing back, I won't even say push back, I just had a different vision and it was someone was either gonna show me or not. I was never gonna conform and paint beach paintings. If you did conform you would not be yourself, you'd not be an artist. You'd not be what I call in broader terms, a creative individual.

Victor Grasso 13:46

Yeah, totally.

Ed Drozda 13:47

I think the lesson to be learned here is it's important to follow that which is driving you, not to simply acquiesce. As you said, you had to go through the motions, that the murals were a stepping stone, but you knew you were not gonna be hanging out there.

Victor Grasso 14:02

I always heard, you're never gonna make any money unless you paint beach paintings. That's what so many people thought. If I gave anything back to the young people who wanted to be artists they realize now they don't have to paint that stuff to make a living. You still gotta be really good and have your own vision, but you don't have to do what people did for so long to make a living at it. You can make a living having your own vision. I think that's a cool thing because I didn't have that living here and growing. It was like you paint this or you're never gonna make any money, and that's just not true.

Ed Drozda 14:38

That's what we're told, and it's convenient if you're happy to acquiesce and say okay, fine. But I think that's the differentiator between the true creative, the true artist, and those who are simply in it for the notion of what they're gonna get out of it. I think it's much deeper than that.

Victor Grasso 14:54

It is, it is. I don't wanna take away from people who, I mean I love Andrew Wyeth, and he painted what he knew. He painted things like sticks. He also painted gorgeous, highly emotional, figurative work as well. There's nothing wrong with going out and painting the beach, but you have no right to tell somebody you have to do that. That's the thing.

Ed Drozda 15:16

Right. A truly creative individual has to tap into their own vision, and if they can't do that it's not possible to achieve what they're there for in the first place.

Victor Grasso 15:27

No, and that's a really hard thing because when you first start you're inspired by so many people, so many things, it's natural to imitate. It's an evolutionary process. You're extremely lucky if you can find your own voice very early, but when it does it's magical. The main thing that I've learned, and I tell any young artist who asks me is the most important thing is to do it for you and to be you. Do what you love and make the pieces for you. The pieces that I have no intention of selling, I don't care what anybody thinks, I'm gonna sit down and I'm gonna make this piece for me. They're the ones that fly right off the wall. It's because people, whether they know it or not can read honesty. I'm not being self-righteous or on a high horse. People can read when you really put yourself into it, it's honest and it's you. It's a natural thing. And I'm not one of these new age kind of aura people. Sometimes the hardest thing is being honest with yourself.

Ed Drozda 16:31

Appreciate that you're saying that. Honesty, integrity is fundamental in whatever we're doing. Being able to be recognized for that as you say, the pieces that you truly created for yourself. I'm not gonna sell this, that's not the point. Yeah. This is for me and for people to actually see you in it, to actually get the sense of Victor in this. I would think that's the ultimate art form.

Victor Grasso 16:56

Yeah, I think so. I think so, and it's okay to experiment. As an artist, at least in my experience, my biggest enemy is myself. It's self-doubt, it's imposter syndrome, it's low self-confidence. Can I ever do this thing again? All of that stuff. So it's not like every piece is gonna be a hundred percent honest. A lot of times it's not, but it's not like you're doing it to do it. I mean, a lot of times I compare stuff to music because I think music is a little bit more universal to people. There can be a great album and there's some great songs, but then people say, oh there's filler songs in between. You know, the people still wrote these songs. You still make paintings and you might have to meet a quota. Every quota, every deadline, it's all self given. So it takes a tremendous amount of self-discipline to do it. Mm-hmm. That's any self-employed person. It's, you're not gonna hit everyone out of the park. So there are some things, it's not like you didn't do it to do it for yourself, but sometimes things just get a little, oh I thought of that really quickly and it didn't work out, or it didn't hit it outta the park. Or maybe I just wanna do one more. But sometimes they work out great too. Like you hear stories of Paul McCartney,"I wrote Let It Be in 10 minutes when I woke up after a dream". The toiling over it is, you know I'm 48 years old. When people say how long does it takes to do that, it takes 48 years. Everything takes however long you're alive. It's the years and years of toiling that allow you to produce something, sometimes extremely quickly, that is brilliant. I'm not saying that anything I've ever done is brilliant Ed, but you know what I mean, you know.

Ed Drozda 18:33

I admire your work, but beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. The creator never sees it that way because that's our nature. I can always do one more, one slightly better, blah, blah, blah. Sorry to say you're not alone. You're just one of the rest of us, right? But seriously, you bring a gift to the world and I'm sensing that the biggest gift of all is that you have found yourself. You are confident in who you are. You're able to create these pieces of art that reflect you, and whether I like it or I don't like it, whether I buy it or I don't buy it is not the important part. The important part is you're able to put it out there and we align with those with whom we're aligned and we don't align with the others. Right?

Victor Grasso 19:23

Totally. Totally.

Ed Drozda 19:25

I feel that your journey is fascinating, that as a young boy influenced by your mom, your grandfather, and those around you, and that led to further curiosity with artists that you might see in books and museums and so on. It was as if you were born to be an artist.

Victor Grasso 19:47

Yep. A really good friend of mine, Steven Gibson, a great artist was in an interview and he was talking about us. He said there was never any question that we were gonna be artists from day one. We just had no idea what form, and that's the crazy path. I wanted to be a comic book artist, and I think I secretly still do. But here I'm a fine art painter, and a gallery owner now. So you never know what form, well, you never know anything in life, but I always look at it as an evolution and a journey. You have to be open to listening. I am a representational artist, imaginative artist. A lot of what I represent is being a good listener and being a good observer. I see things differently, in finer detail than a lot of people I know. Look at it as observing and kind of mentally logging. I wouldn't say I have a photographic memory, but there's certainly things that, it's like there's an inspiration box in my mind that I kind of keep everything, you know.

Ed Drozda 20:44

Very cool. I look at a blank canvas or sheet of paper, and I say to myself, yeah, I could envision something being there but heaven knows where to start.

Victor Grasso 20:53

Well, that's the thing. The work that I do is heavily thought out and heavily designed, so everything starts in a sketchbook, whether it's a squiggle or a fine drawing. Once I get my rendering what I want it goes to gathering reference, whether it be photograph or something from life or whatever I'm gonna work from, and then it goes to a final stage. Whether it's a final rendering, a small study painting, whatever I'm gonna do. And then it goes to the final piece. It's very rarely that I'll paint something on a whim. I'm not a plain air painter. Things are very thought out and drafted, especially'cause I consider myself a storyteller. It can happen quickly but it's a lot of gathering reference and observing things and trying to figure things out. I always say, to me a painting's like a puzzle. And a lot of that is because I'm not academically trained. One of the benefits of going to an art school, at least for learning academic realism, is learning a system and learning how colors work and color theory, and temperature change by creating form with temperature and all. I had to learn all this shit by myself, and I still don't know it. I gotta remember'cause I didn't spend four years training with it. So I don't have a system. It's like figuring out a new puzzle every time I start painting, but the end result is completely my own because it's my brain figuring it out. All the stuff that I don't know. I know it, but I don't know it to the degrees that a educated person would know it. So it makes it my own, which is a benefit. But it's hard man. Like everybody will tell you painting's hard. It's not easy, otherwise everybody would do it.

Ed Drozda 22:36

I can't imagine it would be easy. You bring to mind the oft-touted disparity between those that think you must go to college or the trades. Those four years invested in college is gonna give you something you wouldn't otherwise get. On the other side, there's definition of what you're going to do. You become a technician who is capable of physically doing something. And I think we've come to realize the tradespeople are in more of that place to be able to exercise their own utility, their own function and purpose. What I'm hearing you say is that you have had, and I'll use the term luxury, of all along being able to develop yourself as you wanted to.

Victor Grasso 23:22

Yeah, I mean I think that's anybody's journey really. You could have a cardboard box factory and not know anything about it. You could have liked making boxes when you were a kid, and just build and build and build upon it, and next thing you know you're distributing around the world. For me, with the college thing I had a stint for a semester at a liberal arts college and I was already painting and making money. I kind of did it to appease my family and it was not for me at all. But what I realized later on is when I was graduating high school in 1995, and you know, it's the advent of the Internet, I'm still analog a hundred percent. I didn't have any real guidance for an art school. And little did I know, I didn't find out until many,

24:08

many years later that PAFA, the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, the oldest

Victor Grasso 24:12

fine art college in America is an hour and a half away from me. I would've gladly gone there, which probably would've been the right place for me'cause they focused on academic realism, and Philadelphia was loaded with brilliant academic painters going back to the beginning of the country. The only thing that I knew mainly from friends who were applying to big art schools like Pratt, or Yale, was that at the time there was a huge focus on abstract expressionism. And because I'm hardheaded and opinionated and, don't have time for anybody who instantly shoots your idea down, I had no interest in a college professor telling me that my drawings of dragons, and guys with swords was shit because your opinion is that this is the way it's gotta be. I'm sure that that wasn't every college, but at the time there was a a massive shift in attention towards that. But all these kids from my generation grew up on Conan the Barbarian, comic books, He-Man, Dungeons and Dragons, we were all wanting these things. I wish that I had found my community. That's another positive thing that college can do for you. I didn't have a network a community of like-minded people. The biggest negative effect is there's a lot of people out there who think like me and have the same aesthetic as me. But I don't know them because I didn't go and find them. And like I said, I'm a homebody, and I'd rather them come see me.

Ed Drozda 25:46

I have to say that on balance it looks like it turned out really well.

Victor Grasso 25:50

It's okay. Um, but it's great that you have a community, and that's probably the best thing about social media is finding your community. It's probably about the only good thing, you know?

Ed Drozda 26:01

Yeah, we'll leave that subject there. Okay?

Victor Grasso 26:04

Yeah.

Ed Drozda 26:05

Well Victor, our time is up, so is there anything you'd like to leave us with?

Victor Grasso 26:10

The one thing we didn't touch on the gallery, the Jawbone Gallery. There's a mission here in Cape May to bring cutting edge, masterful art to Cape May, and still tie in that history that's rooted in the beginnings of fine art in the country. A lot of really brilliant, amazing, historically great artists have been to Cape May. All of these people were in Philadelphia, whether they were teaching art at PAFA or working there, people like Thomas Eakins. You've got all the Wyeths, the whole Wyeth family. Norman Rockwell's been to Cape May. You have a long history of brilliant academic painters who would come down, check it out, visit the beautiful beaches, and it goes on up and through history as well. And that I feel hasn't been embraced as much, not that it's not embraced, of course people would love that, but it's now being able to be shown. We get a lot of people in the gallery, PAFA graduates, but also I'm bringing in artists from all over the world. Like this first show, we have artists from Australia, the UK, Germany. We have artists from both coasts. I'm trying to develop a really incredible, dynamic art scene in this amazing beach town that we live in.

Ed Drozda 27:30

There's a lot of things to come and I look forward to following the story as it continues on. Perhaps at some point as it evolves we'll talk again like this, and hear how she's moving on. How you're moving on.

Victor Grasso 27:46

Any more questions for me?

Ed Drozda 27:48

I feel like that's pretty good. So Victor, I want to thank you so much for being with me today. I appreciate learning more about your journey and all the things that you're doing. And I look forward to getting back to Cape May, stopping into the gallery, and finding you there because I'm always there at the wrong time. My next visit will be sure to connect. So folks, this is Ed Drozda The Small Business Doctor, and here at The Water Trough I want to thank you for joining us today. My guest Victor Grasso, has his gallery in Cape May, New Jersey, and if you find yourself in that area I'd strongly encourage you to go and pay a visit. Of course we have beautiful beaches there and so on and so forth, the list goes on. I wanna wish you a healthy business, and I also want to encourage you to keep an open mind, as Victor has told us here today there's so much opportunity and it starts with our being open to and aware of the possibilities. Thank you folks. Victor, thank you.

Victor Grasso 28:47

Thanks, Ed. Appreciate it.