My new exhibition opens August 1

He who fashioned the depths of the sea left nothing to chance. 

The sea has always told its stories.

Stories of impossible trials, survival, monsters, myths, legends, and lore. From Homer's Odyssey, where Scylla waits to swallow ships whole, to the biblical Leviathan. From Melville's great white whale in Moby-Dick to Jules Verne's giant tentacled beast in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, and H. P. Lovecraft's sleeping god, Cthulhu. Across centuries and civilizations, sea beasts have haunted the imagination, lurking just beyond the horizon where the known world surrenders to mystery.

To tend a lighthouse is to keep watch at the edge of the known world. Through the storm, the beacon burns while something ancient circles just beyond the light. The beast is vast. It gnashes its teeth, churns the tide, and with the sweep of its fins summons typhoons.

As shipbuilding, commerce, and the oyster industry flourished throughout the nineteenth century, the Delaware Bay became one of the nation's great maritime corridors. Beacons of light rose from the shoals to guide vessels between the Atlantic Ocean and the ports of the Delaware River. Many of these lighthouses still stand today as monuments to Victorian ingenuity and maritime progress. Built of iron, brick, and timber, they weathered the sea into the twentieth century, growing in stature and importance as guardians of the bay. From the northern reaches of the Delaware to the iconic Cape May Light watching over New Jersey's southern tip, they remain steadfast against the tide.

In The Sea Has Teeth, Victor Grasso transports us to another world, charting a mythic course through five historic lighthouses, each standing against its own leviathan. It is a voyage into folklore, the sea, and the imagination, where watercolor breathes startling realism into creatures that have haunted sailors' stories for centuries.

With thunderous roars the ocean smashes.

With spit and spray the ocean gnashes.

With weight and fury it lies beneath.

Behold.

The sea has teeth