March 18, 2024
Transcription: Making Art Books with Ray Troll
Transcription
Anne Kelly:
Tonight we’re talking about publishing art books with artist Ray Troll. This is Art in the Rock. It’s great to see you, Ray. It’s been maybe a year or so.
Ray Troll:
Time does fly when you’re having fun or time’s fun when you’re having flies or something like that.
Anne Kelly:
And so you’re working on a book now?
Ray Troll:
Yes. Doing this one with Clover Press out of San Diego, and they do graphic novels and Marvel comic stuff. And these new Fal publishers, they have this thing called a Kickstarters. It’s been pretty cool. I’m pretty stunned by the reaction. It’s a very different way for this old boomer to do a book. The
Anne Kelly:
Last day of the Kickstarter is
Ray Troll:
The 28th of August. I’ve done 10 books. Traditionally, you work on these books for maybe a few years. A couple of these book projects took like 10 years. You finally finish it, you send it off to the publisher, you mail the hard drive or the slides back in the day, the manuscript, and then you wait half a year before it ever comes out. And then you’re lucky to get a book signing or two or that kind of thing, and then you engage your public.
Anne Kelly:
I was curious about that process.
Ray Troll:
I approached the publisher a couple years ago and met them. I always believe in that, just know who you’re dealing with. And I clicked with Robbie, who’s the head designer there, and just really like what he does with the books. They just look so wonderful. But it also helps that he’s a fishing fanatic himself. He’s a fish freak. And so we kind of bonded over that. He spends a lot of his spare time out fishing in the open ocean. I said to the hard drive down, just chock full of my stuff, hundreds, maybe even a thousand images or something, and just let Robbie have at it because it’s a visual book. It just said you strangled the darlings. I wanted to see what he would pick out. I really didn’t want to give him any guidance. Here’s the hard drive. Some different categories go, and I have a lot of categories. Hi, it’s art, humor, paleo fishing, natural history, just straight up goofy humor, surreal. So I’m all across the board, but the consistent thing is my weird taste.
Anne Kelly:
Well, and it’s kind of a retrospective
Ray Troll:
Book. Yeah, yeah. I know. I keep saying it’s a mid-career, but no, I’m going to be 70 and looking back now, it’s been 40 years since I moved to Alaska in 1983 and where that, it’s four decades worth of stuff. And yeah, there’s a certain clarity that comes to you when you’re looking back over your stuff. I’ve still got, if I’m lucky, I’ll get another 10 years of maybe 15 ish, 20 would knock on wood, whatever. But I think unlike our musical compatriots out there who write all their good stuff in their twenties and then after that they never hit our, I don’t know. I’ve often thought about that dude flat out run out of ideas. Well,
Anne Kelly:
I recall in our last conversation you had said something to the effect that there was not enough lifetimes to really explore all of your ideas. I don’t foresee you running out of ideas,
Ray Troll:
No ideas or topics, directions to go in. But as you get older too, and you are nearer to the finish line, your time is limited. You want to make it worthwhile. So looking back and calling through my work and working with a talented crew like the guys at Clover Press, it’s interesting. I just had a whole rush of a bunch of ideas and I had a clear shot of time out in the studio and I did a bunch of new ones, and I am squeezing them in at the last minute. Oh wait, this is a good one.
Anne Kelly:
That’s cool to have such a span of time when one publication
Ray Troll:
That you start seeing these images that have become kind of iconic and you don’t want to be just stuck with the one iconic image, but in a way, as the dust of history settles on you, you’re got to be known for a handful of works.
Anne Kelly:
Hard to know what those are.
Ray Troll:
It is hard to know they are. But I have a pretty good inkling via the T-shirt market, which is kind of my platform in a way that’s been my every man’s art put art on shirts, but I’ve got some bigger kind of epic mural paintings I’ve done. I’m very proud of. There are some of the bigger canvases that do spread across a few pages and that kind of thing. So
Anne Kelly:
Well, I’m looking forward to seeing the book. And speaking of the book, the cover image,
Ray Troll:
That’s the icon.
Anne Kelly:
I mean, that’s the title of the book. I watched your interview with Letterpress the other day, and I believe he described that as your tombstone.
Ray Troll:
Yeah, my tombstone image. Yeah, he spawned, he died. There it is. But I’ve heard myself introduced lots of times. This is Ray Troll and people like the Spawn Die guy. Oh yeah. Okay. So yeah, that’s probably the one, something about it that just kind of summed up a lot of things.
Anne Kelly:
When you originally created that image, what year was that ish?
Ray Troll:
Anne Kelly:
Did you have any concept? No. Been worn by rock and roll stars. It appeared in a movie. It just seems to have kind of taken on a life of film. It
Ray Troll:
Has been very good to me. And no, I didn’t really have an idea how it would stick and be a perennial as it were, but so it’s still in print and like I said, it kind of sums up the West Coast, Pacific, Northwest Alaska in some ways, I think with most of my images, but even the dumb jokes, there’s something behind it and I think maybe people can see that. So there’s something behind an image like SP Die. I’m comparing us to fish. I do tours with my friends on the creek down here, and I do explain to ’em what’s going on. These salmon are on a mission, and that is why they are fighting their way up that waterfall. And the creek is absolutely plugged right now, and they are on a one-way mission to get it done. It’s a one-way ticket to that party, and they’ve saved up their entire lives to be at that party, and it’s about a week long party. And then after that, they’re spent it, it’s going on right now and soon there’ll be an aroma here in town that everyone will smell, and that is the smell of death. So yes, love and death, big themes, and they’re both, it’s in that T-shirt hero, Santana toasts.
Anne Kelly:
Those are big themes,
Ray Troll:
Love and death. A lot of people have dealt with it over the years. No, we were, I was first talking to Robbie and Hank down at Clover Press. We were talking about 120 page book, but Robbie, as he kept going, I don’t know if he’s just trying to flatter me or something, but he said, there’s so much good stuff here. Let’s widen this book up. It’s now 200 pages, and so it is going to be still portable. But yeah, it’s going to be a big book and just a couple of essays in the front and then visuals and no text. There’s going to be titles to the pieces, but it’s not like an academic study of it. It’s just a wrong through the stuff.
Anne Kelly:
Have you worked with that publisher before or is this a new relationship?
Ray Troll:
No, no. Oddly enough, it came through. One of my scientist friends, Kirk Johnson, he’s out at the Smithsonian now, and there’s this fellow by the name of Pete Bon Shelley whose stuff I’ve seen over the years. But Pete wants to do a museum exhibit, and he had mutual friends with Kirk. He’s a paleontologist, and he had approached Kirk about just this idea of paintings of monsters. He did this really large mural, and it’s a big accordion book that Clover Press had done. It’s a history of cinematic monsters. And he just painted this whole big long thing, and it became this book. And somehow Kurt mentioned to Pete, Pete had seen my stuff. And anyways, it was connection there, and I saw Pete’s book of monsters and Pete sent me an email. We did a little mutual fanboy like, oh, I love your stuff, love your stuff.
Ray Troll:
And that he mentioned to me, I think via an email that CL Press might be a good fit. And then when I went to their website and saw some of the other artists and just what they’re about, it seemed like, yeah, they do a lot of comics and historical comics like Terry the Pirates and even Popeye Collections and stuff like that, but also some just art books like Pete’s. And then I saw Ricardo Delgado’s, and he’s a graphic artist that I absolutely love, and he works on movies and that kind of thing. He had done a book called The Age of Reptiles Once that just blew me away. And it was just basically a graphic novel of dinosaurs. And Ricardo had just done a very elegant book with Clover Press Dracula. It was Ricardo’s version of Dracula, Ram Stoker’s Dracula. So anyways, I was like, these guys, I actually was on Epic Road trip and stopped in and met with them, and that’s when we clicked.
Ray Troll:
So they said, let’s do it, but it’s been a couple years in the works, and I would see rough drafts of it a little bit. And then as it’s time to start the Kickstarter, and that’s when it became really real. So it’s very real now, and we’re sprinting to the finish line. We set the bar kind of low with the Kickstarter, but even then, if there’s something to worry about, I was really worried we’ll be hitting the mark. It was a few thousand bucks and then boom, and the first day we’re way beyond it. So it’s going well, and we’re already funded at a certain level, but all those premiums are on there in there now. So I’ve actually thrown in things like original sketches and now I’m going to throw in some more original sketches. People are just snapping those up. And then, so some of the preparatory sketches I do, but also the groovy dust jacket and then the puzzle. We did a puzzle and people just go and ate shit over the puzzle. They want that puzzle, but you got to buy a book.
Anne Kelly:
So the last day of the Kickstarter is the 28th of August. So anybody who’s watching before the 28th of August in the year 2023, check out the Kickstarter. I was looking at it the other day. There’s the base levels, the book
Ray Troll:
Book plates, and I’ll sign a bunch of those. The dust jacket, there’s stickers, there’s big oversized marks. And then yeah, the puzzles, and then some originals too. So some sketches and that kind of thing. They’re pretty cool sketches, so they went pretty fast. But I have a lot of sketches, so
Anne Kelly:
Well, what a cool way for somebody to get one of your sketches. It’s not an offering that I quickly see on your website. You can put your print in the book, you can frame it on the wall, buy your book. You can do whatever you want once you buy it.
Ray Troll:
I’ve always been kind of wore Holly in Old Andy up in the sky now, but Andy in the factory, I loved how he was just cranking out art, but he was just doing products and that kind of thing too. And then Keith Herring artists that were just doing products, Kenny Shar. So it’s putting your art at any kind of product. I’ve always enjoyed that. So I’ve actually gone into fabrics now, which is a sideline. I finally did a bunch of stuff on Spoonflower, so I’ve got a whole new line of these fabrics have been doing. So if you go to my website, you’ll see that. Do you know about squi flour?
Anne Kelly:
No. I was going to say I’d been following this fabric.
Ray Troll:
I used them many years ago, a decade or so ago on some exhibits. We had some fabric printed. But basically you can upload your artwork and make it a repeating design and offer it to the world. And basically they can print it on different kinds of fabrics, but they also manufacture things like they can’t do place mats and things like table runners and tablecloths, and they pay your royalty. Then you can order the fabric yourself and have it made into stuff. It’s almost like an Etsy shop or whatever. You can have your little shop there. So if you go to spoonflower.com, punch in my name or go to my website and check it out. And I’ve been doing these pattern drawings for many, many years, many years. In fact, I’ve got one right here. And I’d always wanted to do a button up shirt, and this is the Evolution of Life all on one shirt.
Ray Troll:
And I’ve done that for an exhibit years ago, but now this is one of the patterns. It’s in the spin flower line. And so quilters have been getting the stuff, but also people have been buying it and making it into shirts and that kind of thing. But the beauty of it is that, yeah, you earn a royalty and it’s a pretty decent thing. They’re selling it at a retail price, so it’s hard to get a bolt of fabric and be selling bolts of fabrics, but there’s ways to go around that. It’s a cool thing. So yeah, just go check it out. You’ll really dig it. It’s another income stream. I think as an artist, I learned this a long time ago. I’m just creating all the time a draw and I paint, but monetizing that and not in super expensive ways and making it affordable for the average guy.
Ray Troll:
Not everybody can afford a $5,000 painting. Why not do your art on these other media? But also if you get these little income streams here and there, here and there, basically licensing, royalties, that kind of thing, you can cobble together a living. So the T-shirts, the books, the exhibits, and now I added this. It took a long time to get all the fabric patterns together, but I’ve got maybe almost 20 patterns. But I think mine are kind of different than just the typical repeating kind of patterns. There’s science behind them. So there’s salmon lifecycles, there’s the evolution of Life. Life. There’s Ammonites, there’s Jurassic dinosaurs and Cretaceous dinosaurs, and then there’s just skulls. I
Anne Kelly:
Also heard that you were working on another book as well, that was another road trip book. Not necessarily for kids, but
Ray Troll:
It’s all ages, but it’s targeted the kids. But yeah, I haven’t inked the deal yet. It’s still kind of going back and forth, but there’s a publisher that wants to do a fossil roadmap atlas for the entire United States, and it’s going to take a few years to do that one. So yeah, like I said, as we get older, I get like, what am I doing the next 10 years? I think I’m going to have a couple of years of working on that. But it’ll be fun because it will necessitate fun road trips with the paleontologist. Kirk is going to work with the troll again. So if it all comes to be, knock on wood,
Anne Kelly:
That’s the thing I think a lot of people don’t realize about book publishing, but books can take. They usually take quite a few years. Many, many years. I get asked often, do I need a book? No, you don’t need a book. Books are great. I love books. I have a book collection. But unless you’re really driven to want to do the book, it is a major endeavor. So you need to want to be into that for years of your life. Yeah,
Ray Troll:
I’ve had a couple of books that have taken 10 years to do, but they’ve been fun to do. But I’m doing other things as I’m working on them. I think it’s a great way to have a focused body of work. So I did a shark alphabet book and I drew nothing but sharks in alphabetical order A to Z, but it was an idea that I pitched and it took me a year to do it, but I enjoyed it, did a few other things as I was working on it, but it’s a good focused body of work and another income stream. So yeah, I really do believe in books. Actually. I just signed another book contract, so I got a few books in the works, and this one is, it’s a body of work that I had stacked up from a mural project, and I knew that there was a book there, and I approached an author to kind of help write some words to tie this all together. And we got a book contract. So it’s a deal now. She is the author. She has found a story thread through this big pile of art, but on the contract for the first time ever at the end of it, there was an agreement there that I wouldn’t use an ai.
Anne Kelly:
Wait, there was an agreement that you wouldn’t
Ray Troll:
Use? It was in the contract. It was in the contract that they wouldn’t use an ai. I wouldn’t use an AI with something to that effect that basically I wasn’t going to just talk to my computer and have that generate the ai, the major thing rippling through the world right now.
Anne Kelly:
Oh, definitely. I had not heard about it in that context though, that it
Ray Troll:
Would be, no, it’s the first time I’ve seen it in a contract like, okay, I’m not going to have my computer do the homework for me. Colleges and schools everywhere are going to be faced with this. Basically, you don’t need that dog to eat your homework anymore. Chat, GBT will do your homework and or your artwork and or your music. That’s a slippery slope. I purposely left. My studio is analog only, and no computers out there do have my cell phone out there to look at stuff. But when I go out to my studio across the driveway, that is only analog. I don’t stream music out there. I have a lifetime’s worth of albums and CDs and cassettes and just my pencils, pens, paper, canvas, paint. And that was just a pact I made to myself a long time ago. And in here, it’s computer land here at the house in my old kitchen studio.
Anne Kelly:
So there are digital components to your work, but you divide. And I was actually wondering earlier today, what does Rachel think about ai? Because unless you’re living under a rock right now, it’s hard to avoid that subject.
Ray Troll:
Yeah, adapt or die. That’s what evolution is all about. But I think it was two years ago, there were those people that were first experiencing ai, and I had one of my super fans called me up and said, Hey, man, you’ve got to check this out. Basically he was having the AI doing me, and would I mind if he was to feed some of my imagery into his ai, garbage disposal, whatever. And I remember I put him on speakerphone as I was driving and I was like, what? No, no, no, don’t stop. And I’ve had some friends who’ve gone way deep into AI and artist friends too that were interested in robotics and all along, they’ve been interested in robotics since the seventies. So conceptually they were into it and they went way deep into it, but they only do a certain amount of digital stuff to begin with. And I’ve come to rely on my friend Grace Freeman to do a lot of the digital coloring on my pen and inks just because when it comes really down to the pixels and staring at a computer screen, it’s just a different world, and I’m not as comfortable with it as I am out in analog land.
Anne Kelly:
It’s a different experience.
Ray Troll:
Yeah, it is. Yeah. It hurts your eyes really, because what I’m looking at right now is actually moving pixels all the time. So you may not be aware of it, but your eyes are working overtime.
Anne Kelly:
I don’t think this AI thing’s going anywhere anytime soon that’s going to disrupt everything.
Ray Troll:
Screenwriters are on strike now. One of the reasons is ai, it can write scripts, but then when you have a lot of major computer folks in the world warning us that it could be the end of civilization, well, that’s kind of something you ought to pay attention to. Weapons systems. We’ve all seen these movies, and when you unleash a machine to just kill anything that’s moving, that is this mission. Yeah, there’s scenarios that start playing on like, oh crap, fake news stories and all that.
Anne Kelly:
Well, what AI is definitely missing is human consciousness. To recap real quick, anybody’s watching this post, Kickstarter, the book should still be available. What is the distribution network?
Ray Troll:
We’ll have it on our web store, but it’ll be available on all the book outlets, Amazon and preferably your local bookstore and or your graphic comic bookstore spawned You Die, the Thin Art of Ray Troll 200 page, it’s a hardback, deluxe art book. It’s my life all in one place. You can buy a bundle of them, almost get ’em at wholesale. If you buy a bunch in the Kickstarters, it is coming out close to Christmas, just saying,
Anne Kelly:
Yeah, great gift. So
Ray Troll:
Yeah, capitalism and our art and capitalism, loving money, all that stuff.
Anne Kelly:
Well, hey, you are an artist. That is your profession, and
Ray Troll:
We make a living doing it, and I hope to be out your way. We’re opening up another front in Kansas of all things. My wifes and I Prairie Sea Gallery in Lindsborg, Kansas where I went to college. There’s four art museums in a town of 3,700, and we are closing down our brick and mortar retail store up here in Ketchikan at the end of this year. That’s kind of news to the world there. But we did announce that locally here, still going to do online stuff and still have a presence all throughout the northwest and wholesaling. There will be a really cool thing happening in their space that we have here in Ketchikan, and there’ll be some continuity there. And my stuff will still be in there, but it’s not going to be our store. But also after 40 years here, we’re going to split our residence a little bit and open a pretty cool gallery in Kansas. But anyways, I’m warning you, Ann, you’ll be within striking distance.
Anne Kelly:
What is the largest city in Kansas near the gallery?
Ray Troll:
Wichita. We’re north of Wichita, south of Lawrence.
Anne Kelly:
Well, I do have family in Kansas City,
Ray Troll:
Right on the way. You’re on I 70 headed that way. Just take a right turn. I 35 and there’s Lindsburg little Sweden, USA. It’s an arty little town, so I love the Midwest. I love the west, so it’s going to be cool. It’s a really cool old building we’re able to afford. I’m going to be a last Kansan or Kans Alaskan, something like that. But thank you for having me on your show and thanks for promoting the book.
Anne Kelly:
Before I let you go, if you could have any superpower, what would you pick?
Ray Troll:
I’d want to fly because I don’t know, I, Jeff Flying Dreams
Anne Kelly:
Occasionally. Yeah,
Ray Troll:
I do too. And how cool to be, just be walking down the street and I’ve established a relationship with some of the birds here in this town. I’ve got Ravens that I know that say hello to me. There’s two of ’em. Just live right over here and be cool. See them way up high. It’s like, I want to go up there with them. I didn’t see that one coming in.
Anne Kelly:
Had to throw that in, how it,
Ray Troll:
Well, on my podcast at the very end, I asked the question, what you could go back in time into deep time? Where, what period would you go to? What epoch? What delicious paleozoic or Paleo period would want to go to? And so we spring in our guests all the time and it’s always interesting to see what they come with. That’s my Paleo nerds podcast.
Anne Kelly:
That’s randomly a question I usually ask as well, but coming up with a new one for ya this time, you’re still doing that, right?
Ray Troll:
Oh yeah. There’s one coming up with a really great artist, John Chee, one of my art heroes artists and scientists. He sculpts, he gives us a glimpse into ancient humans and how we came to be. And he does. He’s a scientist too, really, and an artist. Extraordinary guy. Super excited this, share that one. So yeah, that’s up Paleo nerds. It’s really fun. Just like you’re doing, go find some interesting people and talk to ’em and throw it out there in the world.
Anne Kelly:
Thanks for watching Art in The Rock. If you’d like to learn more about Ray Troll, you can watch our first conversation. I’ll include a link above or maybe it’s over there at any rate. It’ll also be in the description below, along with a link to the Kickstarter. Thanks for watching. I’m your host, Ann Kelly.
