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 Drivin' with Darwin (1998), pen, ink, and watercolor on paper.
Digging down to the data
Ray is constantly glancing up to see if you get his joke, or
like his work. When riffing about life in Ketchikan-"With all the
rain, it's the wettest you can get without actually being
underwater"-he tucks his hands into the pockets of the fleece
jacket bearing the Soho Coho logo of his local gallery. He unzips
it, revealing a yin/yang salmon t-shirt from his collection, as we
sit down to breakfast at the Cape Fox. The lodge towers on a cliff
above the old part of town. "I'm an omnivore in a big way," says
Ray, dropping the napkin in his lap and ordering the biscuits and
gravy. Through the gray drizzle out our window, we look down on
Ray's city of 23 years. He points toward the dock where he had his
first job as a fishmonger, and up north a bit to the cannery where
he had his first studio. It was there in the early 1980s, printing
up "Let's Spawn" t-shirts with salmon running across them, that the
odd fish artist with mass-market appeal was born. The shirt sold
out in two days.
Later he made his most famous t-shirt, "Spawn Till You Die,"
with a skull and two mature salmon as crossbones. The shirt is
standard apparel among motorcycle riders, teenagers, and
fisherfolk. Seeing what caught on, Ray quickly enhanced his t-shirt
empire, diversifying into posters, postcards, paintings, and
eventually whole books filled with his art.
Looking to the community around him, he started what he calls
"culture-jamming," borrowing from his environment, the fish, the
fishermen, the seascape, and the local Native American imagery, and
then putting in touches of Brueghel and Bosch.
As he developed his Ketchikan style, he began to understand more
about his environment. His drawings became more accurate. His early
red snappers, for example, didn't have the right number of fin
rays. They were "cartooney a little bit," he says. Now his fish are
close to exact almost down to the number of scales. "It got to be
fun to blow people's minds with what was really real," he says.
For Ray, the coolest reality is evolution.
Charles Darwin got it after five years aboard the HMS
Beagle and a trip to the Galápagos. He came up with the
theory of evolution through natural selection, and later, in The
Descent of Man, published his findings that man and ape
descended from a common ancestor.
Most people get the connection back to the apes, but how many
take it further, asks Ray. How many of us can name the steps that
connect the earliest life forms with Homo erectus? "How
about all the stuff in between?"
For Ray Troll, a better understanding of the in-between came
just a few years ago at a natural history museum in Los Angeles. A
scientist there explained how Homo sapiens were vertebrates
descended from fish and that our hands are an evolved version of
fins. "That was my epiphany," says Ray. "All of us with backbones
are basically the fish group," he says. "Wow. Then you start seeing
the world in a different way."
 Troll's Dancing to the Fossil Record exhibit in 1998
at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Photo by Sean Duran.
He found himself making the connection between man and fish
again and again. "You learn these things in biology classrooms, but
a lot of times science is so detail oriented, the bigger
realizations are not so apparent," he says.
He wanted to explore it further. In 1994 he and writer Brad
Matsen decided to tackle the subject with their book, Planet Ocean,
tracing life on earth over the past four billion years. They
filled the book with a summary of prehistory in plain English
and Ray's fanciful drawings; they told of the trilobite, the
first creature to have eyes, and the lobe-fin fish, the first
vertebrate to get oxygen from the air. In his art for the book,
Troll took the fish out of the water and the fossils from the
strata. In Ray's world, primordial soup comes in a can, and the
fossil record is "a dusty old album with lots of skips and
scratches with a great beat-easy to dance to." Maybe evolution
would be a little less scary if only we could see how fun and
amazing it is, he says.
"He gets what paleontologists get," says Kirk Johnson, curator
at the Denver Museum of Natural History. "He gets that these things
are real, and cool, and weird."
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