Follow Your Inner Fish: A Conversation with Ray Troll

The work of Ray Troll, featured artist in our Summer 2026 Issue, has been a familiar fixture in my life since childhood. My late father used to sport a shirt with Ray’s infamous fish-pun art Spawn Till You Die, and our family’s collection of other Ray Troll apparel continues to serve as a source of Pacific Northwest weirdo pride.

When I told Ray about my sense of kinship to his work and that my dad had passed last year, he didn't offer condolence so much as recognition. “That's the heaviest and most subtle trick of all,” he said, “but it pervades my work.”

Beyond his impressive list of artistic accomplishments and scientific advocacy, Ray has made an entire career of looking mortality in the (fish)eye and finding it somehow hilarious.

Fish Worship

Ray Troll's mythology began in 1983. With two art degrees and no plan, he found himself hawking salmon out of a dockside shack in Ketchikan, Alaska, at his sister's seafood company. “I had to immediately know a lot about fish,” he told me. What he found, watching the salmon runs choke the creeks and die within days of spawning, wasn't grim so much as clarifying. “It's all about sex and death,” he said. “And love. It's realizing we're all on the same journey.”

That reverence widened until it swallowed everything in his path. Take the ratfish, for instance. Ray became fixated on this deep-water cousin of sharks, purely because they looked prehistoric. Something about these mysterious, overlooked creatures sparked in him a voracious curiosity. He cold-called specialists. He geeked out with PhDs. His drawings of this ancient specimen were even used as illustrations in a scientific paper that confirmed the strange growth atop a male ratfish's skull was, in fact, a tooth—a holdover from the jaw of its ancestors, used to grip a mate during the peculiar contact-sex ratfish still engage in, alone among their cartilaginous kin.

Not long after the success of this paper, a newly described species was named in his honor: Hydrolagus trolli. To mark the occasion, Ray drew himself a certificate and mailed it to the scientist who'd bestowed it.

“An obsession isn't something you can rationally speak about,” he explained when I told him about my own recent obsession with deer bones I found in a Finnish forest during a digital-detox writing residency. “But maybe as the years go by, you get some perspective on it.”

With deadpan wonder, our conversation transformed into a nerdy exchange of recent discoveries and personal encounters with the natural world. Ray brought this part of our discussion to a befitting conclusion with a passing campaign to have seals and sea lions reclassified as “sea bears,” on the grounds that their closest living relatives are in fact bears. “Few people know that,” he explained. “So, let's start calling them sea bears.”

I told him I'd sign the petition.

A Band Is a Family, a Family Is a Band

Ray’s obsession with sea life has never been confined to the visual arts alone. Intense passions have also leaked into his musical endeavors, where he’s spent decades in creative, aquatic collaboration. The Ratfish Wranglers grew out of a Ketchikan radio show he did with a former student. The group absorbed a musician named Shawna Lee, and eventually Troll put his own teenage son Patrick behind the drum kit. Patrick now fronts the band Whiskey Class in Seattle; his niece, Erin, tours with her group, The Heists. Last spring, the three bands shared a single bill at Troll Fest, celebrating Ray Troll’s unique love for and accomplishments in science, art, and music.

“Everybody should be in a band,” he told me. He meant it as a sort of philosophy of collaboration, rather than a hobby. “It's a group of friends, honing a joint idea, and everybody's contributing something to it.”

The same logic governs his visual work: like how he trusts colorists with his palette and researchers' expertise in his drawings, blurring the line between art and fieldwork. Almost nothing in his world is created by one person alone.

What Brautigan Left Behind

Out of my own selfish hope for a common obsession, I asked Ray how many times he’d read Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America. In response, he delighted me with excitement and a befitting tale as background for his enduring interest in the author’s work.

Trout Waiting for the Dinosaurs to Go Away

Ray arrived in Ketchikan not long after Brautigan had passed through. He walked the same silver stairs in town and absorbed secondhand stories from a seafood plant owner who'd once gotten thoroughly drunk with Brautigan. Ray eventually started an annual poetry reading in Brautigan's memory. Brautigan’s short poem, “Yes, the Fish Music,” which ends on an image of trout hiding from dinosaurs, sent Ray down a research hole that became his first real scientific credit: evidence that ancient trout coexisted with dinosaurs and that salmon likely evolved in the Arctic. He renamed the piece that came out of it Trout Waiting for the Dinosaurs to Go Away.  

The Working Artist

The mythology aside, Ray runs what could be described as an itinerant studio operation. Over the last decade, many of his creative works have taken shape through book projects, several of which he worked on with Kirk Johnson, a paleobotanist he met at Seattle's Burke Museum in 1994. Johnson now directs the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. The two share a Guggenheim Fellowship from early in their collaboration and have put out three books together since. Their current effort, a series called Fossil Maps USA, is a two-years-and-counting project that maps the fossil record state by state. “It’s something meant to be thrown in the back of a car and driven anywhere,” Ray said. “I think we owe it to the next generation. We should know the history of the earth. We should know we are earthlings, and where we fit in.”

Charcoal and Bones

Near the end of my conversation with Ray Troll, I asked if he could wake up one day living inside a piece of his own art, which would he choose? He didn't hesitate long. “Rain on the Parade,” he said. “It's like a celebration of my friends and my life around me.” Ray's wife is in the piece. So are a couple of bandmates, and Israel Shotridge, a Tlingit carver and close friend who died earlier this year. “It's kind of a mysterious piece,” Ray said. “Has this vibe to it. The charcoal. It's dark and brooding. I call that stuff my ‘hard art.’”

When I asked him if he had a favorite bone, he laughed, made a couple puns, and ultimately landed on scapulae. “Shoulder blades are very interesting shapes,” he said. “And pleasing to say out loud.” His daughter once found a fossilized horse scapula in Kansas. “They make good hoes, apparently,” he added.

Look Deeper

As our conversation came to a close, Ray spoke about how one’s obsessions with things like bones and fish and other oddities serves as an effective social filter; artists and misfits and nonconformists understand. When asked if he had anything to say to all our weirdos out there, he had keen insights to share.

“Artists, scientists, writers, philosophers: we look more deeply at the world and wonder about the connections,” he said. “We see them and revel in them. The unexamined life, is that worth living? I don't know. Examine yours. Inhabit the moment. Follow your inner fish.”

These words ring true, coming from the man who moved to Alaska by accident and became one of the foremost living authorities on a fish most people have never once thought about. Somewhere inside all that accident is a whole way of living: pay close attention to whatever you cannot stop thinking about. It might turn out to grow teeth on top of its head.  

In his studio on a hill above Tongass Narrows in rainy Ketchikan, Alaska, Ray Troll creates fishy images that swim into museums, books and magazines, and onto t-shirts worn around the world. He draws his inspiration from extensive field work and the latest scientific discoveries, bringing a street-smart sensibility to the worlds of ichthyology and paleontology. Troll’s paintings and mixed-media drawings are in the collections of the Miami Museum of Science, the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, Alaska Airlines, the Anchorage Museum, the Alaska State Museum, and the Ketchikan Museum. Troll has recently collaborated with Kirk Johnson, a director with the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History, on the book Cruisin' the Fossil Coastline: The Travels of an Artist and a Scientist along the Shores of the Prehistoric Pacific. Learn more about Ray Troll and his work at https://www.trollart.com.