ASP Podcast #18: Ray Troll, Ichthyomuse, Art, & Rock & Roll
Ray Troll, Corey Arnold photo
Listen to Ray and Dan with your favorite podcast player, or via Apple Podcasts
Ray Troll’s world of Fish, Art, & Deep Time
Formative years, early influences
Art as Ray’s childhood superpower
Kansas to Seattle, art scene, grad school, up to Ketchikan
Ketchikan, art scene, native culture, studio above a fish plant
Obsessing, drawing and painting fish;
First T-shirt project, “Let’s spawn”
Growing his T-shirt empire; “Spawn ’til you Die”; “Humpies from Hell”
A description of Ray’s work by Brad Matsen; book projects together
Collaboration on Planet Ocean
We ARE fish; all vertebrates are descendants of fish
“How I became a Scientific Surrealist”, keynote at Academy of Natural Sciences
Ray’s artistic process; phrase or pun first?
Sketch to finished piece; depth and complexity; adding color
Being part of a band
Deep time; perspectives of our time now
Fossil record tells us life endures
Podcast excerpt: 55:35 (minimal editing for clarity)
“We all want to be hopeful. If we get our wits about us and keep our wits about us and try to do the right thing individually and then collectively, there's hope for the planet. And I do think we make progress slowly, so I have hope. You know, I’ve got a couple of kids, no grandchildren yet… Ahhh, we screwed the place up, our generation and the generations before us—the party is kind of coming—you know, the party could go on, but we’ve got to be responsible party goers, I guess. The beat goes on dude.
The beat does go on!
So I’m trying to end on a happy note. Hope! But we have to be smart. We have to be smart.
Yes!
Just have to be smart. And I think knowing our place in the world and how we came to be here. How we came to be in this planet and how I'm lucky enough to live in one of the last wild places in the world, bringing it back to Alaska. It's so inspiring to have ancient forests that are intact. It’s like walking back into the Pleistocene. If I go that way up the hill, I'm in deep woods, and it's like going back in time and if I dive down into the ocean over there and my right side—go down the hill there’s the Pacific Ocean. And there are creatures in there that have been alive on the planet for 300 million years and jellyfish have been here for half a billion years and plankton… So, yeah, so there is endurance— there’s enduring life and that is one thing too that the fossil record will show you just like they say Jurassic Park, life will find a way. We just have to make sure that we humans are part of that life that finds a way.
Boom, there's the microphone drop!”
The Ratfish Wranglers