November 24, 2022
Transcription: Ray Troll and Making a Living as a Artist & Other Fishy Tales
Transcription
Anne Kelly:
Hey friends, welcome to Art and the Raw conversations with creative people. Tonight I am thrilled to introduce you to Artist Ray Troll. Some intelligent person came up with a new genre to describe Ray’s work, which is scientific surrealism. Like to know more, keep watching. If you’re regular here, it’s great to see you. For those who are new, you might be wondering who I am. I’m your host and Kelly. I’ve been in love with art and music about as long as I can remember. I’ve now been working in the professional gallery world for about 16 years now, and I started Art in the Raw about halfway through 2020 to keep people connected and inspired. If you see value in that, consider telling like-minded friends subscribing, throw me alike. It’s free, and it really helps. If you’d like to know a little bit more about the show or tonight’s guest, take a look at the description below. But now I’m excited to introduce you to Ray. Welcome Ray.
Ray Troll:
Well, thanks for having me. I’m sitting here in my living room in Ketchikan, Alaska, where it’s a beautiful sunny day.
Anne Kelly:
I have never been there before, but I, I watched a little studio tour that you have on Oh yeah, YouTube last night. My, I think I would like to come visit now. It looks beautiful. Well,
Ray Troll:
That could be deceptive. You know, it usually rains here, but in pre pandemic times, we’re getting about a million people through here, ships and, you know, independent travelers from May through September. We have a lot of people from outta town. In fact, many days there’s more of them on the ships than actually live here in town, or basically a border town, the first place you come to in Alaska on a cruise ship or flying in. So we catch ’em coming and going. But it’s also a really great place for artists to be, you know, because there’s kind of that tourist economy, but visitor economy, I think that’s really has a lot to do with the scene here.
Anne Kelly:
Well, I’m in Santa Fe, Mexico, so can relate with significantly less rain.
Ray Troll:
The rain is what keeps most people at bay, keeps from becoming California.
Anne Kelly:
You are not originally from Alaska, but you are known for, as you describe them, your fishy images. I would imagine being on the water in such a location provides extra inspiration.
Ray Troll:
Yeah, it really does. I landed here almost 40 years ago before I got here. Fish were already kinda showing up in my artwork, but came here to be a fish monger, someone who sells fish fresh outta graduate school. I had my master of fine arts degree, had my undergraduate degree in printmaking. The short version is I got very inspired by the fish and I found that audience.
Anne Kelly:
Now you run a, a gallery with your wife Soho
Ray Troll:
Coho, the Soho Coho. I was born in New York State, so it’s kinda my shout out to New York in a way, you know, so, and then coho are one of the species of salmon that we get here. We are on a salmon spawning stream. In fact, the fish are in the creek right now doing what they do this time of year. And we are in an old house of ill repute, a body house, as it were, a whore house historically. None of that going on now. Just fish up to stuff. But anyways, <laugh>. Yeah, my wife Michelle runs the gallery. It’s about a thousand square feet. So it’s a pretty, it’s a pretty large space. We do brick and mortar retail, plus we do online stuff now. We’ve been in business for 30 years,
Anne Kelly:
And your works can be found on paper and museums, on t-shirts, snowboards. Seems like you’re a firm believer of the art being for everyone.
Ray Troll:
I do have the Warholian factory approach in a way, like put the art out there, kind of a pop art sensibility in some ways, but surrealist at heart, the absurdist, humorous, all those things, they don’t fit neatly into any one category. I do high art, maybe really high art and low art, middle brow art. I don’t know. My printmaking background. I was doings graphs and etchings and engravings and that kind of thing. So having my imagery on objects has always been really of, of interest to me. She, like in the eighties, really seeing kinda arty sort of t-shirts. There are people starting to take fabric. Art is a medium to work with and have a t-shirt line now for 40 years. I like to think of it as affordable art. I really do believe that art should be kind of egalitarian. It should be for everyone. I like to sell originals for, you know, larger sums of money, but I really do like the idea. And you can buy a piece of my artwork for 20 bucks, you know, and wear it.
Anne Kelly:
I’m a believer in that myself. While I do work in a gallery, I kind of hate the idea that some people are, are intimidated and they just feel like it’s kind of this elitist thing. So I always appreciate when somebody can have offerings that fit in a wide range of price points and, and make it friendly and affordable. But
Ray Troll:
Don’t get me wrong, I do love going into the, you know, higher end galleries. But yeah, there is an attitude sometimes that’s just very palpable,
Anne Kelly:
Right? And work takes a long time to make. So the high price points of certain pieces are necessary cause well, hey, you maybe spent several hundred hours on something
Ray Troll:
And having run a business too, I understand what it takes. Well, my wife runs the, the gallery end of things, but I understand what it takes to keep the lights on, keep employees and, you know, we have four or five people who work for us and, you know, keeping things moving having to pay attention to the bottom line. We’re not subsidized by any means, you know, we have to make the rent. But I, I do think that I’ve been lucky enough to not compromise my vision. I take my artwork seriously. I, since I’m self-employed and, and actually perfectly unemployable, <laugh> <laugh>, I have to impose my own work ethic. So I do show up at the studio, work a nine to five shift kind of of thing. You know, take a break right at lunch and, and then get back to work.
Anne Kelly:
That’s great advice for artists. There’s kind of this myth of make things when you want to.
Ray Troll:
I’m inspir
Anne Kelly:
Now picks it up. But yeah, the best advice I’ve really heard is if you’re gonna be an artist, treat it like a job and have studio hours, the things you’re describing.
Ray Troll:
And also, sometimes you show up the studio and not much happens. That’s okay.
Anne Kelly:
But you showed up, you
Ray Troll:
Show up. There’s periods where you’re between things and you’re puttering. You know, just grabbing books, sweeping the floor, cleaning up the place, waiting for the next bubble to appear in your brain. But it does inevitably. And so I’ve never flooded that, you know, like what’s I’ve brought out of ideas. They come, it’s part of my dna. It’s who I am.
Anne Kelly:
Plus you’re gotta sweep the floor. Somebody has to do it
Ray Troll:
<Laugh>. Well, yeah, I should sweep the floor a lot more often. It is sort of the ultimate man cave or whatever out there. It’s, it’s out of my house and it’s my own space, which I think is important too. I don’t live in my work other than it’s on the computer, but I don’t have my own artwork in my house. It’s mentally kind of fatiguing to be looking at my own artwork, hanging on the, on the walls. It’s cool to literally go out, go across the driveway, go up the stairs to my studio, have another space work and live in that space, live and breathe it. Sometimes I’m so into it, I have to just tear myself away, have the downtime, the recharge time. You only get those two eight hour blocks in your life, right? Another eight hour block is sleeping <laugh>, and then eight hours work and eight hours of goofing off. So,
Anne Kelly:
And sounds like a very nice commute. You have to work.
Ray Troll:
It is nice. Yes. There’s bears sometimes. You were asking about the proximity to the ocean. I’m looking at the ocean right now out my window. I have a spectacular view here in this little house we live in on the hill. There’s deep forest on one side of our house and kind of surrounding it in a way. But there’s also this way down the hill is the town, but two blocks in the other direction going up the hill is wilderness. You know, the wilderness begins and it’s wilderness. It is, you know, it’s the same as it was 11,000 years ago. Down the hill is, is the eternal ocean. And it’s a terrifically inspiring place. And the town is about, you know, a joke that’s two blocks wide and 14 miles long. And, and it kinda is, you know. Well,
Anne Kelly:
I would ask you about fish as inspiration, but I know everybody asks you about that. And I, I kind of get it myself. I’ve always had an obsession with fish that I’ve never quite understood. And in fact, when I was in elementary school, I got in trouble in art class because in every piece of art I created, it was either fish or dice. I don’t know why, but my art teacher got angry with me one day and she told me I needed to diversify in my
Ray Troll:
Dice. Huh.
Anne Kelly:
I don’t know what the deal with the dice was. I haven’t hear you. I would like
Ray Troll:
To hear that. Well, you invited Rachel in your show. Watch out, <laugh>. Well, it’s hard to explain. You know, an obsession doesn’t make a lot of sense. But since I have been so fascinated, I have, you know, parsed it apart, the topic is endlessly fascinating now. There’s so many species, I’m just curious by nature. And I, you know, really believe in fostering curiosity and fostering fascination in the world that try to get others fascinated with the natural world and just the world we live in and who and what we are. But I, I was drawn to the fish for their beauty and their variety and, you know, I was selling them. And then I realized there’s this whole fish culture up here that has really fed this entire coast Pacific salmon, really at the, at the heart of it, these incredible fish. So as I followed the topic deeper and deeper and deeper, I didn’t let go.
And now I realize there’s not enough lifetimes for all the stuff. Here’s the thing about the dice, though. I ended up using dice as one of the icons or little subtle symbols in some of my exhibits. I do these museum exhibits too, you know, I do the T-shirts, but I really love museum exhibits and collaborating, making books. I did a book called Planet Ocean Dancing to the Fossil Record with my friend Brad Matson. And I’m, I’m a paleo nut too. So prehistory really fascinates me. And I, I had a rudimentary understanding of how evolution happened, and I knew that there was a critical moment there where the fish crawled out of the sea. But I went deeper and deeper into that topic, and I really became kind of a semi quasi expert or whatever on it, because I just wanted to know as I was tumbling into this topic of fish, well, let’s look at those prehistoric fish.
But then when you come to the realization that we are descendants of fish, when you get your head around it, we are variations on fish. We all, the vertebrates are basically fish. We’re just modified fish. The dog under your table, there is a modified fish. We’re all descended. And when you’re descended from something, you are that group. So if you were a Hatfield or McCoy, you’re one or the other. So the branching tree of life where all the vertebrates on the planet are descendants are fish, where they’re in the fish group. But hows that happen? Chance is a total chance, is it a role of the dice mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, or is it, do we want to believe that it’s meant to be? Do we want to believe that there’s a hand of fate? Does religion figure into this? These are all questions all of us ask. An exhibit grew out of the dancing and the fossil record book did these various tanks, and some of them were fish tanks, and one of them had a, a lung fish in it. And we are more closely related to that lung fish than the lung fish is actually to other fish, which is pretty wild. But basically it’s an airb breathing fish. There’s a, there’s a clue when the water, it will drown. But in the fish tank, I put all kinds of dice in the bottom of the fish tank.
Anne Kelly:
No kidding.
Ray Troll:
Throughout the exhibit, as you walk from case to case, there were just these dice, like in the gravel and stuff, and in the, at the bottom of the cases. And then I would paint ’em on the walls too. So there were these subtle hints. Is it just a roll of the dice or does God play dice with the universe?
Anne Kelly:
Interesting. And you had a bunch of other elements incorporated in that exhibition. I was reading up on it. I mean, there was a dancing element and dance floor. Yeah, a dance floor. And, and what else was included in that exhibition? Well,
Ray Troll:
There were dance costumes that you could put on. And then there dance steps, there were fish tanks. So we had living creatures in the Denver Museum in nature. We rolled in a Volvo and Charles Darwin driving it, I’m all about bad puns. So we called it the Volvo. You know, here was this surreal, weird humor in a natural history museum, but it was all driven and inspired by science and also vetted by scientists so that anything that was in the exhibit, there was a point to the humor. It wasn’t random, but even the dice that were decorating the walls, sometimes you don’t spell it out enough, you know, I mean, that’s the, the beauty of art and the best art is the most enigmatic. You know, those that don’t just hammer you over the head. There’s something unique about it or mysterious about it that draws you in. And you can interpret it in different ways. So it’s not just a sign. Somebody said, art says what we cannot say, music does the same things. It’s undefinable, really. You look at a piece of art, it works or, or doesn’t. It kills it almost if you explain overexplain it. But, but I do like to get people tuned into the science. It’s inspiring
Anne Kelly:
It. You have a pretty significant fossil collection. Well, a lot of your images do have this humorous element to them. The actual source material comes from a very scientific and accurate place, plus being just around fish in day to day life. So that’s kind of a beautiful marriage. Well,
Ray Troll:
Thanks. But yet there’s elements of Mad magazine and pythonesque humor and or cultural references and you know, rock and roll and that kind of thing. So basically a reflection of my life and what I do. I’m a musician of sorts. It took me a long time to be totally comfortable with the label of being an artist. I used to like, well, I’m an artist, you kind of almost apologize. That’s what I am. But when I say I’m a musician, I always kinda wince a little bit. I’m not that good of a musician. But anyways, more of a punk rock attitude. And I, I do have a band. When you’re a creative, as they say, you don’t know what’s gonna come out of the box. Sometimes I go out to the studio and I’ve got guitars out there too. And maybe it’s a day that I draw a little bit, but then I kind of noodle around with a song idea and write lyrics and the occasional poem, that kind of thing.
You know, fragments from a song can end up being a title of a painting or a T-shirt slogan. So like, fish worship Is it Wrong, is a scratch board image that I did. And it’s an absurd, just struck me one day that phrase that I don’t know where it came from. My recovering Catholic kinda childhood and just this image of a fish and all these hands kind of worshiping it. And, you know, it’s, it was also me putting myself on the couch. What is it? What is it with this fish thing? <Laugh> fish worship? Is it wrong? And I thought, that’s never gonna sell as a t-shirt. That, but in a way it was, it was saying, what you can’t say really, which is there’s another people out there with this same problem that you and I have, and we’re just kind of obsessed with phish and what’s worth that.
Once I did that, I kept thinking, well that’s maybe the title of a song. I should write a song that goes with that, that phrase. And it’d be cool to have that image up there and then have a song that goes deeper into what Phish worship is. You know, all the things, the aspects of it. So that’s where the creativity comes in, you know? So I do what I love, but I try to put it into the real world so I can make a living do what I do. So you don’t wanna operate in a vacuum. If you’re an a musician, you want an audience. And if you’re an artist, you know, I do it for myself, but I want an audience. Over the years, I’ve gained that audience. I mean, I picked up that cran at age four. And you know, there was one period in my life, maybe when I was 13, when I thought I wanted to be a pilot for some reason, but then none.
And I got rid of that idea and I was back on track. I wanna make a living as an artist. It was my childhood superpower, if you will. And so I was determined to do that. And I had a lot of day jobs, waited tables, bartender, all kinds of stuff, you know, as I worked my way through college and, you know, I taught, but I wanted to end up making art that when you looked at one of my images, you knew it was my art. That’s not easy to do. Course we all are sponges and especially in your student phase, you, you kind of glm onto a look or style that’s not your own, you’re trying them on. And then from them you take those things and you begin to make it your own. And so I’ve done that. I, my influencers are literally on my sleeve <laugh> s and things.
But then I began to kinda look at some of the art now and pick it apart and see some of the direct influences. But I, it’s a smorgasburg and you take a little of this little of that little bit of Andy Warhol, little bit of Peter Broel and MOUs Bosch, and mix it up with Mad Magazine and a crumb and throw in some magret, maybe a dash of Dali, and then throw in Zap comics and that kind of thing. So, and New Mexico, you’ve got a really thriving art ecosystem there that’s just like amazing. I’ve traveled through there a few times. I had a show once and only one exhibit ever in New Mexico. And it was at the Naturalist Museum there in, in Albuquerque years ago. But it was on a particular kind of prehistoric shark. I’m sure you caught it.
Anne Kelly:
I wish I did. And a lot of your exhibitions have been at Natural History Museums or
Ray Troll:
It was the niche that I landed in the novelty of. What I ended up doing was this was a fine artist let loose and the Natural History Museum. I had my fine art sensibility drawing and whatever creative juices I had going at the time and was in a natural history setting. I went to art school and then my training was to, you know, go to a gallery, have gallery exhibits. That was the goal is to be either a teacher or a gallery artist in the seventies, you know, when I was in art school and then in the eighties and when I got my master’s degree, that was still like you taught or you went the gallery route. Commercial art was just, wasn’t even considered art. You know, it was commercials, graphic design. It wasn’t, wasn’t serious art. And there was never any training in any sort of business or licensing or copyrights or clues that might actually help you make a living as an artist.
So I actually do have done a talk on all the things I wish that I’d learned in, in art school that they never taught me. If I was to go back and teach now at this stage in my life, I would certainly have classes in that kind of thing. And licensing, you trademarking what to do when somebody’s appropriated your image, but also what museum exhibits are about, how you go about getting a museum exhibit and the kind of deals that you can cut with museums, they don’t teach you any of that is a lifetime of just doing this stuff. But look it back is like, I darn it, I wish that there was at least some kind of real world class that, all right, listen kids, this is what’s gonna happen. You’re gonna get outta art school and there you are. Then what, you know, art school enrollment is plummeting.
College enrollment is plummeting. I fear for the planet really, cuz I think it’s a wonderful thing. I’m super valuable. And when there’s somebody who’s like, should I go to art college? You know, you know, people have asked me that or what’s the point of it? Or would I ever make a living as an artist? I encourage them to because Jen, you can never lose with education. And I, I tell them this and you know, sure, your parents are probably freaking out cuz you want to go to art school and how’s my kid ever gonna make a living? Well, the answer is, mom, dad, just look around you just about everything around you is informed by some sort of artistic decision at some level. So, you know, the label on the cane of soup that Warhol pointed out, the graphic design of the magazine, the billboard that you look at, the films that you watch, everything, you know, the paint that you put on your wall.
We are bombarded with imagery everywhere and good god that the world is also content hungry. Give the next thing. But you’ve gotta have your wits about you and pay attention to the bottom line. But if you don’t have the ambition gene, it’s gotta be really tough. Tough. You could be a bleeding genius, but the world may never find you or come to your door. If you’re gonna do a painting or write a song, it takes a lot of guts to make that phone call or go to the gallery and say, Hey, I’ve got something worth looking at. But you’ve got to do good work, but also promote that work to
Anne Kelly:
Wear a lot of hats.
Ray Troll:
Yeah. And there’s also a certain sense of shame that we have in somebody who promotes themself, narcissistic people outta control and you know, we know of them, but you’ve got to have that self-confidence and you have to promote yourself. That shameless self-promotion, it’s fearless self-promotion. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. You need to gather your strength and say, I’ve got this thing that I think is worth looking at to get up in front of a stage and play a song that I, I wrote this song. That’s terrifying. Yeah.
Anne Kelly:
How else is anybody gonna know? A lot of the things you’re saying, a lot of your interests over time just really resonate with me. And I wonder if we’re related. You’re Irish, I am. Last name’s Kelly.
Ray Troll:
You have red hair,
Anne Kelly:
Kinda reddish brownish. This
Ray Troll:
Used to be red. You got a DNA test that we, we could be related to
Anne Kelly:
<Laugh>. You, you have some scientist friends. It’s interesting. The way I actually found your work is, is on my friend’s snowboard. Oh,
Ray Troll:
Cool.
Anne Kelly:
My friend who’s also named Ray, Ray Belton, I was doing an episode on other ways that art is disseminated and I was on the chairlift with him and he Oh cool. Had his lib, tech snowboard with your art on it. Oh
Ray Troll:
Yeah. Lib
Anne Kelly:
Tech. And, and I was like, well wait, who’s art is this? And I filmed something with him talking on the lift. And then I went home that night and Lib tech’s pretty good at actually saying who the artist is.
Ray Troll:
They’ve been absolutely work with. They, they approached me years ago and their art director and approached me just email outta the blue saying, Hey, we’re a snowboard company. We like what you do. And there’s one of our writers really likes your work Ek, he’s a pretty well known snowboarder and he’s got some Alaskan roots himself. And he’d see my stuff when, you know, he was growing up. I’m kind of part of the cultural scene up here. And so Litech approached me about using my work and was a great designer there. She just kinda looked through my stuff and she does a, a remix of it elements and she’s has that eye. And I, I love seeing what a good designer can do. I do my own kind of design work too, but a really good designer, graphic designer, those people I used to shun in art school, <laugh>, you know, cause they weren’t real artists. So she designs the boards, but takes my art and knows how to frame it on there. Pretty much every year I’m, I’m kind of one of their, the brands with EJA and my boards are associated with him.
Anne Kelly:
So that was how I found the work. You also have a podcast, yours is called Hao Nerds.
Ray Troll:
Indeed it is. When the pandemic hit the Planet, oh, that many years ago,
Anne Kelly:
Back in 2020.
Ray Troll:
In 2020, I have a friend who is a ventriloquist of all things. He’s an amazing ventriloquist. He can have five or six of his, his puppets, his robot puppets going at once. And he’s doing all the voices. He’s a big deal down in Australia where he is. Household name. His name is David s Straussman. He just so happened to have a house up here in Ketchikan. Anyways, his tour was canceled down under, so he had nothing to do, rattling around the house. And he knew about these things called podcasts and was an avid listener to a number of sciencey podcasts. And I’m I’m admittedly very much a boomer and I kinda had a vague sense of what podcasts were. Anyways, Dave called up and said, let’s do a podcast. So we do it for the fun and the love of it. There’s no commercial aspect to it whatsoever.
Whenever we talk about, well, maybe we should get a sponsor, we should try to, well then it becomes a real job. And I don’t want a real job <laugh>. So when we first started out, we’re doing episodes, weekly episodes for a while, and then it was like yikes. It’s a lot. And it’s a lot. Yeah. So now we’ve slowed it down. We’re still doing it though, so we’re still committed. And he’s back on tour again. But anyways, we do that and it’s two of us interviewing one person. It could be a little crazy sometimes, but we edited it down or Dave edited it down and all the music in it is original. It’s either my music or my son’s music or friend’s music. So it’s all original stuff. And Dave throws in a few sound effects. So they’re, they’re pretty produced. And then we have Monica, some Alaska public radio stations. We have 56 episodes so far. Got two in the can right now. You know, 95% of them in paleontologists. I like to stretch it out a little bit. Done. Fellow artists, paleo artists, couple photographers, and one filmmaker. We did do one on Ratfish once with it. I theologist. But yeah, it’s fun thing. So check em out. Paleo nerds.com.
Anne Kelly:
And speaking of Ratfish, your band is the Ratfish Wranglers,
Ray Troll:
You know, any ratfish that need wrangling, you can call on us.
Anne Kelly:
I’ll, I’ll be on the lookout.
Ray Troll:
Well, yeah, the Ratfish Wrangler, there’s three of us at the core of it. When I first got to Ketch a can, one of my first jobs just to keep me doing out in the studio is I was a substitute teacher at the high school and I was, you know, not too much older than the students, fresh outta grad school. But there’s this one student in particular who was kinda snarky and witty and he had a band and I, like, I liked what they were doing and they were doing a radio show and he had a real good sense of humor. And basically it was the high school substitute teacher saying, oh, you got a cool band, can I be in your band <laugh>? Which is maybe not appropriate, I don’t know. But that summer he had graduated and we got together and actually ever since, it’s been 35 years now, so Russell Woodhouse is his name. He and I write songs together or independently. But then there’s a vocalist in our band, Shauna Lee, who’s an amazing vocalist. She could bring tears to people’s eyes with her beautiful voice. My son drums with us, he’s got his own band. Patrick Trolls, his name bass player, Chaz guest an amazing guitarist call McCormick Austin Hayes, sometimes drunk with us. We have done a little bit of touring here and there, mostly in Alaska and down in the Northwest. So what you see in my art is what you get in the music.
Anne Kelly:
There’s some videos I found on YouTube. I was listening to a song before we started chatting was Cannery Girl.
Ray Troll:
I’m singing in that, but I didn’t wanna be in the music video. And I thought my son Patrick would look better in the music video. So he’s lip syncing. One of my first jobs here was Fish Moning. But I also did work on what we call the slime line at the local cannery. There was a whole scene in the culture there. My wife was a cannery girl once upon a time, not the cannery I worked in, but I ended up marrying a cannery girl. The direct influence, the Rolling Stones have a song called Factory Girl. I took that kind of skewed it. Jagger and Richards have not contacted me with their attorneys yet, but it’s, i, it’s modified, it’s inspired by them. Mark Osborne did the film and it’s quite
Anne Kelly:
Fun. I really enjoyed it.
Ray Troll:
Thanks friend came in and choreographed too. She’s actually a professional choreographer. So
Anne Kelly:
All of the different things are connected and why not let one medium inspire the next?
Ray Troll:
And what happens on college campuses? There’s these different buildings for these different disciplines and science is over here and the music department is over here and the art department’s over there and you know, the mathematics department’s over there. And really you gotta break down those barriers. And with a true creative type, you’re just hitting on whatever comes to you. And I remember reading a, a quote that Steve Martin said, the, you know, comedian, and he’s a musician as well, but he was writing a critique of a music. But writing about music is like dancing about architecture. Like, yeah, <laugh>, why not dance about architecture? I mean, you have to do that. Science is art. Art is science. There should be overlap and we should not keep everything compartmentalized. You should be a renaissance person. We should, we can all specialize in things that we’re really good at. That said, I should be a much better handyman. I’m fairly useless around the house in terms of practical things. When something breaks, call the shop. I like to cook, you know, things I’m good at.
Anne Kelly:
Well, you can always call the the guy, the business card says handyman and, and maybe you can trade him a meal or a print.
Ray Troll:
I should try that. Especially when the plumbing bill is really high. It’s like, you know, I got this art man, they’re really savvy, you know, handy man. They’ll go for
Anne Kelly:
It. So when you do cook, do you cook from recipes or do you just make things up?
Ray Troll:
Usually kinda riff on things, make things up. But recipes are good starting points. There’s certain things I do in other things. My wife Michelle does that. You know, I don’t go near, I’m not gonna make a cake. Comes to fish and meat. That’s kinda what I do.
Anne Kelly:
You have a fossil collection. I’m, I’m curious about the fossils.
Ray Troll:
They’re on the shelves everywhere. Strange natural history objects. When I moved to Southeast Alaska, I thought this was maybe a fossil deprived kind of place. You always think of fossils being in places like the Gobi Desert or out in the deserts of Arizona or New Mexico. But one of the mantras that I’ve learned hanging out with my paleontologist friends is that fossils really are everywhere. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>. And once you tune into the deep history of the earth, you know, there’s different kinds of fossils. They’re not just all big old dinosaur bones. So I do have a lot of fossils from Southeast Alaska. Now many of them are like fossilized coral and or RPOs. And I’ve been lucky enough to collect some vertebrates here and there. Have all the permits. They’re on public lands. A lot of natural history objects, like I said, including pickle fish. But in our house where the family lives, there are some fossils, but it’s outta control out in my studio, tons <laugh>, the driveway is lined with them. And as you go up the studio, there’s piles of rocks and just cool rocks too. It’s not all just fossils
Anne Kelly:
Per your studio tour. You had mentioned your studio was more of the analog place and the house is more of the digital place. So if you need to do something digital, you go to the house,
Ray Troll:
The drawing and the painting happens out there. And I’m not streaming music out there. I have a big music collection. I spent hundreds, hundreds, thousands of dollars really, you know, vinyl and CDs and cassette tapes over the years. What am I gonna do? Junk, all that? No, just go discover it again. I shuffle ’em around or whatever. But don’t wanna have any streaming ability out there. The phone is bad enough. I wanna keep it analog. I, I don’t like sitting in front of the computer for too long and I’m kind of forced to do digital stuff. But I, I enjoy that as well. But it’s an entirely different thing. My Wacom tablet is in here and I have my pen and a drawings. I’m not doing everything on the computer. I do pen and a pencil, then pen and in scan it, then throw it into Photoshop to hire a colorist to help me out.
Grace Freeman’s doing phenomenal stuff and sometimes everybody memo gie I’ll hire him to help do the digital coloring. But I do the digital coloring as well and or the scanning and then the tweaking of all the stuff and, and that’s staring at a computer screen is so much different than tactile drawing and making a mess. I just don’t want the studio space to be invaded by that. I’m just gonna be analog till the day I die. I intentionally separate them. I remember, you know, when Photoshop came along and now there’s AI programs that are generating art.
Anne Kelly:
A friend was showing you that the other day you could say fish and dice and it would make that art for you, which is wild
Ray Troll:
Fish art. Surreal. So they have these identity crises like okay, what do I, what do I do now if machines are doing all that? I remember that with Photoshop is like, do I have to learn this? I remember the very first time I approached a computer, that was how you were getting data. And I did not want to go near these computer things, how old I am. But I wanted to find a book in the library and the library said, card catalog is now on a computer. I just find them completely different sensory experiences and I want to keep the tactile no matter what. Hence analog studio digital in the house.
Anne Kelly:
I think that’s cool that you physically separate them.
Ray Troll:
I’ve done that where I’ve just lived with my art and now it’s really good to keep it in another space I can walk away from preferably in another building. I first moved to Ketch Can, my studio was in the cannery building. I mean talk about your fish invading. I was upstairs in the cannery and then for a number of years and then I actually had a studio in an old cannery right on the water, which was phenomenal but funky. I had a studio there for 10 years and then I was lucky enough to, or worked hard enough really, I should say, to build my own studio. And when I say to build it once again, I’m not the handyman. I got my architect friend to help me design it. I wanted these big walls so I could do big paintings, but then I wanted a lot of light so I didn’t go insane from depression in the rain. So to have a lot of windows, we depressive artist types, you know, you need that light cuz we tend to go to dark places we created. But yeah, then I had my own space and that’s, it’s great. And for the first few years it did not have a bathroom. Then I was finally afforded to add a bathroom out to it. Completely self-contained.
Anne Kelly:
One step at a time. Like, like you said, you have to be driven and passionate about the thing. You
Ray Troll:
Gotta show up to work. And that’s what I do. I show up to work, I, I go a little bonkers If I don’t have my studio time, I get resentful the computer when the emails pile up too much or the digital coloring piles up too much and I have to power through it cuz I just long to be out in the studio, puttering around, doing some drawings, making a mess.
Anne Kelly:
You have done so many amazing things and you are a modest person, which, which I appreciate. What hasn’t come up is your collaboration with Dr. Johnson, who, have you got a collective Guggenheim together for a book that you worked on?
Ray Troll:
Yeah, it’s kinda a unique thing. There’s not a lot of you know, duo Guggenheims are given out. We got a book, advanced small book Advanced to do Cruise Apostle Free, which our first book together came out in 2007 I believe. We wanted to do another book. The first book was basically about the Rocky Mountain states and just a sliver of New Mexico. I’m sorry we didn’t do the whole state, but we covered a lot of territory and drove around and we wanted to do it again for the West coast. Cuz that’s where I live. I’m on the northwest coast, you know the, the far northwest coast. Just this whole great story out here. So we got an advance, but it was a very modest book advance. So we needed money to support our plane trips and our travel to the fossil sites and to the museums and to go have some fossil adventures.
So we did a, a joint application to the Guggenheim and we got it. And it’s not an easy thing to do, but we had to, you know, do all the paperwork and it was phenomenal cuz we had the Goki dollars is what we said. <Laugh>, we each bought it. Nikon cameras, ire cameras were able to afford some airplane trips and hotels and, you know, know that kind of thing. Basically it was a travel budget mm-hmm <affirmative>. So, which was great to underwrite that Guggenheim Foundation is a phenomenal thing and every artist creative type should think about it or scientist, whatever. It’s, it’s a phenomenal thing. Our country has, but we used the Guggenheim money to, to go to fossil sites and the most extreme one was in our last big trip was to fly to the Coville River, which is above the Arctic Circle, way up in the northern edge of Alaska in the tundra remote place.
Fly hundreds of miles out in a tiny airplane and land on gravel strip and go hunt for dinosaurs in Alaska. There are great dinosaur fines here, but they’re in the northern most unreachable portion of Alaska. So we were able to do that. Went with paleontologists scientists, you know, we weren’t just touring around. They were out there to do some exploring but also some collecting. And I found my nnu sous tooth, which is a type of tyranosaurs. It’s Alaska’s tyranosaurs, if you will. And I found a tooth of one and they’re pretty rare. I was 58 then a younger man. And I, I wept. I seriously did, I would imagine an experience tooth, but it was like, damn man, I finally found it. But yeah, where there’s a lot of dinosaur bones up there. We found a lot of duck build dinosaur bones, which were very, very common.
But Kirk found a raptor tooth, a trudon tooth. But, but then that evolved into a, a museum exhibit and the book Cruise the Fossil Coastline about seven years in the first book and then 10 years in the, on the second book. But also during the course of that perks career kept moving along and my career kept moving along and I’d beat the t-shirt monster as it were, you know, just so we’d squeeze these things in, produced all this work. And during the course of that, he became the director of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, which is no small accomplishment. I’ve known him for almost 30 years now. I, I knew early on that the man was brilliant and it was really a privilege to be hanging out with this guy and like having my own personal PhD just as we drove thousand, we’ve actually literally probably gone around the world now driving, spent a lot of time in cars and in cafes.
It’s been a wonderful friendship. So I say that everybody should be in a band, not just a musical band. Band is a bond and a bond is you know, formed of friendship and the people I’m with in my band or you know, friends. But a number. All these scientists that I work with, I basically, I, you know, become friends with him in this podcast is a one on one genuine relationships. I’m schooled in art and I practiced a bit in science. I haven’t really done scientific papers, but I’ve hung out with scientists, I’ve influenced scientists, which, you know, Kirk is, he was in undergrad school, he was a double major. And his other major besides geology was art. I didn’t pay too much attention to science as much as I should have in college, but I was also doing theater and literature and it was a liberal arts education on top of the, you know, studio arts. But you find those things in other people that kinda, you know, complete you or you can relate to your interests overlaps enough that I’m interested enough in the science that, you know, I can speak science with them. I can speak to PhDs, they’re regular people. Learning with writers like Brad Matson and you know, John Stray, these are friends of mine. And Susan Ewing did a book about the buzz saw Shark rine. Anyways, just creative types.
Anne Kelly:
When I started making the show, it was all visual arts and then I kind of delved into musicians and then there were scientists all of a sudden I didn’t see the difference. Good
Ray Troll:
Blur those lines smudgy.
Anne Kelly:
Exactly. And so I don’t wanna keep you on the computer too much longer, but I do have to ask a about music you listen to, and I assume you’re a Pink Floyd fan.
Ray Troll:
Fian Floyd in, but
Anne Kelly:
There was the dark side of balloon.
Ray Troll:
It’s been in my sketchbook for 20 years and I finally got around to doing it as a shirt. Always wanted to do it. And it’s been doing pretty well. I have eclectic taste, but you know, basically alternative rock and roll. I, I’m true to my hippie heritage, Lloyd and Zeppelin and Stones and Beetles and all that good stuff. And Donovan and I’m just inspired by new stuff all the time. Radiohead and lots of stuff. Bony Bear Fleet Foxes, my son’s band, which is whiskey class. Americana.
Anne Kelly:
It’s whiskey class.
Ray Troll:
Whiskey class, yes. He’s in a band with a woman by the name of Liz Snyder. And there’s a couple other musicians in the band. They’re doing great. They’re doing really cool stuff. My niece Erin Heist and her husband Andrew Heist are Americana bras musicians. And Erin just released her first album this year. You it’s really an incredible album. These are all on Spotify too. You can check ’em out and yeah, there’s been a, there’s a great music scene here in Ketchikan and, and actually all throughout Alaska and I helped get a music festival going 10 years ago. This is the 11th year and it’s called Salmon Fest. It’s up in Nil Chi Alaska. I helped do some of the visual art that got it going back in the day and David Sterns, Jim Sterns are running it now, but that’s still going strong and it’s sold out this year. So it was a really cool thing. It’s a music festival but art is in there. And then activist politics too, to protect the salmon, to promote salmon and celebrate salmon. The habitat issues to protect them, keep the fisheries sustainable, which it is here in Alaska, we’d so promoting it as
Anne Kelly:
Well. What time of year is Salmon Fest?
Ray Troll:
First weekend in August. Erin, hes played this year. That was her first salmon fest was really cool. I did not make it this year, but I have a lifetime pass now. So the logo for the, the festival’s mine and I let the festival use the art now for the festival. So in exchange I got a lifetime pass.
Anne Kelly:
Well maybe Salmon Fest 2023 I will show up cuz that sounds
Ray Troll:
Okay. That’s a very cool thing. Check it out. Wonderful. Festival
Anne Kelly:
Time Travel is another art in the raw question. If you could time travel, do you know just on the fly where that would be?
Ray Troll:
<Laugh>? You know, in our podcast we ask that of everybody really,
It’s a paleo show, so it’s always how deep back into the past. You want to getted Kirk Johnson on it this last time and he tricked us and he wanted to go into the future, the rascal, but for very important reasons. Who would encourage you to check out our song Time Traveling with the shovel? Probably one of our catchiest tunes, the bluegrass version in particular time travel with the shovel. So there’s two versions of it, but I really like the Bluegrassy one that’s on the fish worship album time, traveling with the shovel, dancing with the devil, but the devil you don’t know. Anyways, I would like to go back to the Devonian and I’d like to see that first fish crawling ashore going, wait, what is this place? Mm-Hmm <affirmative>, maybe someday my kin, my people, my fish descendants could have a cheeseburger someday <laugh>, right?
So looking around, I think I’ll stay. So back in the Devonian, which was a radically different place. What an inventive time it was. It’s called the Age of Fishes. So why wouldn’t Ray Troll want to go there? It’s called the Age of Fishes. Cuz there was such diversity in the fish world. There’s lot, a lot of lineages that are completely gone. But that’s when our lobe fin fishy ancestors did make that transition to land breathing and colonizing this brave new world called land breathing oxygen. It’s what I wanna say, giant insects and sea scorpions and, and armored fish. And then these weird fish with bones and their, their flippers and their fins as it were, I should say. And their pectoral fins and then their pelvic fins and et cetera, et cetera. So there you go.
Anne Kelly:
So if you did have to go into the future, I have to know <laugh>.
Ray Troll:
Hmm. I would say there’s, there’s certain critical points that we are, we are fast approaching and I’d be very curious to see what it’s like. And I’d just like to go a hundred years down the road here so I will not be able to live in the year, you know, 21 20, 21 20. And I’d be very curious to see that and whether or not we heated our warnings that all the scientists are telling us and whether or not the world is completely drowned in plastic. And it’s 110 degrees everywhere in the world and it’s 150 degrees Fahrenheit at the equator cuz we’re headed there folks, you know, I’m, I’m guilty of being a consumer every time I open up a plastic container like what the hell are we doing every time I drive my car? It’s like, well, so yeah, I’d like to see if we’re still here.
I’m one of the recent episodes of Pamela Nerds. We had a scientist on by the name of Henry G. He’s an editor of the Major Science magazine, the Science Journal in the World Nature. And Henry doesn’t give us much time at all, only a few thousand years because he thinks we’ve already pulled the trigger, the thing that’s called extinction debt. So if you pull the trigger and you overextend yourself in an environment you’ve only got so long before you’re gone and you can see this happen in the fossil record with different creatures. And so extinction debt, have we already pulled the trigger on that? I asked Henry, he just wrote a wonderful book called A Short History of Life in 12 pithy chapters. Something to that effect. You know, just the entire history of life in 12 short chapters. But then, you know, he predicts into the future what’s gonna happen too with that.
But I asked Henry to, instead of 12 chapters, can you give me the entire history of life and into the future in less than five minutes? Go. And so he sent me a recording in less than five minutes, my son and I basically put some music behind it, took Henry’s voice and took some of my art. And you can watch that and learn about how life evolved in this planet, but also where it’s going and where we’re at now and you know, where it’s how it’s gonna end. So it’s all there. I’ll send you the link.
Anne Kelly:
Please do. I’ve been meaning to actually delve more into some of your Paleo podcasts now that I know the time travel questions in
Ray Troll:
There. Dave asked a big question, this sort of big philosophical question for that. I do the sort of, Hey, where would you want a time travel to? That’d be an interesting thing that each one to write it out, which where they wanted to go. And then put, do a graph.
Anne Kelly:
I don’t know if this actually makes sense, but because I’ve been asking that same question, maybe we could randomly sync up some of these answers. Just a thought.
Ray Troll:
You’re talking to artists, they wanna go back to historic times of some sort.
Anne Kelly:
I found a pretty wide range of, of different answers.
Ray Troll:
Hang out with Van. Go. Don’t do it.
Anne Kelly:
Let’s wrap up with your thoughts on puns and cheeseburgers.
Ray Troll:
Puns and cheeseburgers. Puns have been characterized as the lowest form of humor and eh, I’m okay with that. I am a, you know, ratfish lover, so bottom feeder puns, you know, they’re, they could be punny and I can’t turn it off if I hear, turn a phrase or whatever, my brain just starts associated. It’s a natural thing. And yeah, the more you grown, maybe even the better they are, you know? And then cheeseburgers, why cheeseburgers? And you know, I not like a good veggie burger. The impossible burgers are pretty good, but it’s America, you know, I do love a good cheeseburger. Tennis started in my high school days and hanging out at a burger joint, king X and Wichita, Kansas. And it was just the place we hung out late at night. I mean into the wee hours is a 24 hour hamburger joint and with the big burger and it just, I remember Steve bi band living in the usa the last line in that song. Somebody give me a cheeseburger. And I always thought, yeah, somebody gimme a cheeseburger <laugh>. And I just loved that little line. So anyways, they show up in my work, my son is taking it to the next level and he’s actually turned it into a religion. It’s called Burger Church. It’s kinda his DJ handle name or his company name too. Burger Church. And he loves a good cheeseburger too. And his point is that when you’re eating a cheeseburger, you’re happy. No, why not be happy, eat a burger, be a veggie burger, even better.
Anne Kelly:
Make some art,
Ray Troll:
Make some art,
Anne Kelly:
Make some music,
Ray Troll:
Cheeseburger, drippings,
Anne Kelly:
All of those things. Do you have any, any shout outs other than your son?
Ray Troll:
My daughter Karina, she’s in Portland. Shout out to her. She’s been in a band too, but she’s becoming a science teacher, high school science teacher. She’s working on her master’s degree right now. But I could not do this without my beautiful wife Michelle, who’s wandering into the house from working at the Soho Coho Gallery for 30 years. Partnering well in life certainly makes a huge difference in one’s life.
Anne Kelly:
Thank her for letting us borrow you.
Ray Troll:
And we gotta I’m I’m gonna make some sockeye salmon for dinner tonight. Ah, that sounds amazing. I’m gonna do some miso mayo on it and bacon secret thing. Just do that. Put some miso on your mayo, slather down your fish bacon it, you know, 4 25, maybe do a little broil at the inch.
Anne Kelly:
That, that sounds amazing. I wish I had those ingredients cuz I’m about to cook dinner as well.
Ray Troll:
You can actually get pretty good sockeye at your local Walmart’s evening it fresh, frozen by Alaskan fisherman. So anyways, great talking to you Ann. Thanks for having me
Anne Kelly:
Out. Thanks so much, Ray, for talking tonight. Really enjoyed meeting you had look forward to it for a while. It’s fantastic. Thank you.
Ray Troll:
Well thanks for having me. And come to Alaska sometime and see it in person.
Anne Kelly:
I, I think I’m gonna have to,
Ray Troll:
Got to,
Anne Kelly:
And until then, have a great night.
Ray Troll:
All right. Peace out. Thanks.
Anne Kelly:
Thanks for watching Art and Lara conversations with creative people. I hope you enjoyed meeting artists, Ray Troll. I sure did. Again, if you’re into fun and free art education, tell like-minded friends, like, comment, subscribe, and I hope to see you next time. Have a good night, y’all. Art in the raw conversations.
Speaker 3:
This is my co-host, WOBA <laugh>. Woo.
