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 The Way We Were (1997), handcolored linoleum block print. With the help
of an ichthyologist, Troll's 16-step evolutionary path reaches back
through some really remarkable creatures.
Nature and nurture
It would be hard to define Ray’s childhood because, he admits,
he’s still in it.
But back when he was shorter and less hairy, when he was younger
and living with his mother and father and five siblings, he would
wander through his neighborhood and pick up a rock, saying
hopefully, “Maybe it’s a dinosaur bone.” It never was.
“My first love in life was dinosaurs,” he says. So he drew them.
Obsessively. “Then it was battle scenes. Then airplanes. Then
dinosaurs again.” He and his brothers would “play museum,” setting
up bones and arrowheads for display and then charging their friends
for a tour.
After high school in Wichita, he studied art at nearby Bethany
College, a private Lutheran school where he had his first fish
encounter. In a pottery class, he hit upon the phrase “plenty of
other fish in the sea.” Creating raku-fired vessels with the fish
and the phrase gave him a chance to get in touch with the natural
world and mix in a little lesson about the universal search for
love and romance.
After college, Ray moved to Seattle. It was the late '70s, and
he found plenty of music, couch surfing, and work in a variety of
jobs. He waited tables at the Aurora Tavern, answered calls for the
IRS, and was a silk screen technician at Silver Screens on Capitol
Hill, where he and his co-workers made thousands of t-shirts
announcing “KISW Rock!” After a few years he had enough of living
as a loose end, and decided to formalize his life as an artist.
What drew a kid from Kansas to Washington State University?
Maybe it was the similarities of the landscapes, all the wheat
fields, he says. And then “there was kind of a vibe to the place
that clicked with my sensibilities.” He loved the close interaction
between the instructors and students. They hung out together, posed
for Ray’s photos, and wrote songs with him. Ray rattles off their
names—Gaylen Hansen, Bob Helm, Arthur Okazaki, Francis Ho. And, of
course, Jim and Jo Hockenhull, close friends, and founders of that
not-so-well-known band, Zuzu and the Robot Slave Boys. “We were
huge,” says Ray. “We played the CUB.”
The early 1980s was a great time to be part of the art
department, says Jo Hockenhull, who was one of Ray’s advisors. Back
then, the scene was pretty open—students and faculty collaborated
on projects, performed together, and often staged theme exhibitions
that they pulled together in just a couple of weeks. “There was a
lot of egging each other on to do better, be weirder,” says
Hockenhull. Ray was right in the middle of it, one of the hardest
workers, accomplishing and producing a lot of material.
 Helicoprion (2000), colored pencil on paper. Troll is the first artist
to render a believable illustration of what this long-extinct
whorl-toothed shark might have looked like.
One of Ray’s favorite places in Pullman was the Conner Museum in
Science Hall. He loved to go look at the specimens. He was
delighted to discover that he could check out an eagle or a jar of
frogs. “The scientists were over there putting cool stuff in jars
and putting them up on shelves,” he says. That’s just a waste. “I
would go over and get a roomful of magpies and bring them back to
my studio.”
The one scratch on the record of his time in Pullman was the C
he got from his drawing instructor, Pat Siler. “It really did
bother me,” says Ray. “But it was good for me.” It wasn’t that Ray
wasn’t doing the work. The critique was more about his line
quality. “Art is hard to grade. It’s really a squishy, intangible
thing,” says Ray. “But that’s the challenge for a professor,
finding something that causes you to focus your shtick, form your
vision.”
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