Troll’s fish, fossils depict science in funky art

In 2008 Southeast Alaskan artist Ray Troll was awarded an honorary doctorate in fine arts from the University of Alaska Southeast.

by Naomi Klouda, Homer Tribune

Alaska is a fish culture, or more specifically, a salmon culture based on the drama of the runs as species of salmon go on epic sea journeys from fresh water to salt water and back again.

They begin another epic journey as their “flesh falls off their bodies, males get all spawned out, their snout changes and their bones transform until they become these monsters,” Ray Troll told his packed audience Friday night at the Friends of the Homer Library annual fundraising event honoring Lifelong Learning.
The best-selling “Spawn Till You Die” T-shirt designed by Troll depicts some of that culture’s fascination with the transformation.

Troll was the featured speaker, packing in the largest crowd the event has seen in recent years. His slide show presentation was part biography as he showed the audience photos of the eight-member Troll family from the early 1960s as they moved 11 places during his father’s U.S. Air Force tours of duty. It was part stand-up comedy with a serious twist. Troll’s work illustrating fish is described as bringing a street-smart sensibility to the worlds of ichthyology and paleontology: One-liners he transfers to t-shirts and large scale art, taking it outside the realm of droll textbooks.

Like his own evolution, described as starting from age four when he picked up his first crayon, to today, doing illustrations for the day’s most prestigious museums and scientists, homo sapiens experienced their own evolution. Beginning as a weird lobe-fin fish.

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