Spawn Till You Die: The Fin Art of Ray Troll - (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Ray Troll's new
book Spawn Till You Die: The Fin Art of
Ray Troll is an exuberant plunge into the fantastic realities of sea
creatures and prehistoric animals that come alive with scientific realism and
his quirky sense of humor. For more than four
decades, this celebrated Alaskan artist has been luring, hooking, and landing
fans around the world with his mesmerizing renditions of the inhabitants of
Planet Ocean, past and present. His art is featured in the nation's major
natural history museums including the Smithsonian, in galleries, and in books,
as well as on immensely popular T-shirts. Part natural history adventure and
part underground comic, his work depicts beautiful and accurately drawn fish of
all kinds, Northwest Coast totems, Freud and Darwin, fossils, resurrections of
extinct animals, and much more.

Troll's art is deeply thought provoking
(pun intended) but also simply fun to experience and never far from an inside
joke he seems to be sharing with everyone. Some of his pieces are amusingly
tongue-in-cheek, others are beautifully surrealistic and evocative of the
interconnectedness of life on Earth, and his grandly composed major pieces are
brilliant, inspiring panoramas of the natural world. His whimsy and attention
to detail in his renderings of fish and other aquatic creatures has earned him
a devoted following of scientists, anglers, and people who just like a good
laugh. Welcome to the fishy, funny, inspiring art of Ray Troll.

Review Quotes

From Publishers Weekly

Alaska artist Troll's knack for making intricate,
playful drawings of all things fishy has led to an empire of books, magazine
illustrations, museum shows, gallery displays and decorated t-shirts. This
large-sized, full-color volume presents an overview of Troll's drawings,
complete with commentary by the artist. Some of the pieces are amusingly
tongue-in-cheek ("Rebel with a Cod," "Weapons of Bass
Destruction," "The Lucky Fish Gets the Cheeseburger"), while
others are beautifully surrealistic. But the most impressive are his grandly
composed fish-scapes ("Fishes of the Amazon," "Bottom Fish of
the North Pacific," "A Ratfish Called Troll"), in which layers
of perfectly-detailed fish are arranged into brilliant panoramas. Matsen's
lively introduction provides lots of useful information about Troll's life and
aesthetic leanings, making this a must-have book for any serious fan of the
artist.

Admitting you're obsessed with fish isn't easy. Especially since
there aren't any support groups or meetings you can go to, or therapists who
specialize in fish addiction. How does a guy like Ray Troll tell his kids he's
spent eight hours a day for ten years drawing pictures of fish, filling up
notebooks and scratch pads with endless renditions of ratfish, long ago
abandoning the pretense or that metaphor has anything to do with it? Some of us
are just different I guess, but it seems like a lot more people are tumbling to
fish life of one kind or another, losing control with our finny neighbors.

Brad Matsen author of Titanic's Last Secrets, Jacques Cousteau: the
Sea King and Planet Ocean: Dancing to the Fossil Record

As a visual artist who has popularized many scientific
concepts, especially those relevant to natural history and evolutionary theory,
he has reached broad audiences in ways that can affect public support of and
education about science. And without either of these - public support and
education - science would not happen so easily.

-Dr. Tony Martin, Emory University

If there were such a thing, Ray Troll would be the Artist
Laureate of hallucinatory fish images.

-John Straley, poet and author of detective fiction

Ray is a different
kind of paleoartist... he's a scientific surrealist. His art, while often
paleontological, is infused with the rest of life. In his images, extinct
animals visit the modern world in daydreams, as if R. Crumb had time traveled
back to the Cretaceous.

-Dr. Kirk Johnson, Paleontologist and Director of the Smithsonian's National
Museum of Natural History

When I study the way Ray depicts fish, the fish in my own life
become more vivid and delicious and dear to me. When I ponder the length and
detail of his artistic engagement with fish, and then consider the resilience
and complexity of the creatures capable of inspiring such an engagement, I feel
far fewer fears for the intergalactic Future of Fishes, Life, Ray, me, and
Fish-lovers everywhere.

-David James Duncan, author of The River Why and the Brothers K

About the Author

RAY TROLL is a world-renowned artist known for his scientifically
accurate and often humorous artwork, inspired by field work and research in
marine science, paleontology, geology, ecology, and evolutionary biology. Ray's
renditions of everything from modern day salmon and marine mammals to bizarre
creatures of the prehistoric past have become iconic in fishing, scientific,
and environmental activist communities around the world.

His work, distributed from the Soho Coho Art Gallery in Ketchikan,
Alaska, can be found on posters, hoodies, and millions of t-shirts sported by
fisher folks, the occasional celebrity and many others. Ray'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. His books include Sharkabet: a Sea of
Sharks from A to Z and Crusisn' the Fossil Coastline and Cruisin the Fossil
Freeway with Dr. Kirk Johnson, now director of the Smithsonian National Museum
of Natural History, for which he and Kirk were awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
He and Port Townsend writer Brad Matsen produced four popular books: Shocking
Fish Tales, Planet Ocean, Raptors, Fossil, Fins and Fangs and Rapture of the
Deep.

Ray's recent ventures include co-hosting the popular Paleo Nerd Podcast, featuring informative
and amusing interviews with leading paleontologists and scientists from around
the world. He is the recipient of a gold medal for distinction in the natural
history arts by the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, a Rasmuson
Foundation Distinguished artist award and also received the Alaska Governor's
award for the arts.

Troll
has a ratfish species named for him and an extinct genus of extinct
round-bellied herring named for him. He also plays icthyo-centirc rock n' roll music with his band the
Ratfish Wranglers.