“I was 10-13 years old, when we moved there from Pennsylvania and plunked down in a tropical island,” said Ray, “We lived in a house on a cliff right above the ocean. I’d hop over the fence and hike down to the beach, look at the tide pools and poke around at the fish.”

Ray always knew he would become an artist when he grew up. His art career started at age four or five when he would make his own creations with whatever materials laid around the house. He graduated from high school and college in Kansas and finished his graduate education in studio art and painting at Washington State University. Now, he works primarily with drawing materials, a lot of coloured pencil. Ray said, “It’s faster and easier to think with pencil.” But he likes to change medium now and then, switching from linoleum block prints to acrylics and back to drawing materials.

In 1983, Ray went to Alaska to work at his sister’s fish store on the dock for the summer. As he sold fish and handled them all day long, he started observing them carefully. Fish had always appeared in his artwork, but in a lesser role and rendered very stylistically. As the artist looked closer and closer at the fish he handled, the more interesting they became to him. And so did Alaska, where he still lives to this day.

Ancient fish
Ray said his first love in life was dinosaurs, like any five-year-old boy at the time. When he became interested in fish, he quickly realized that the material in books about ancient fish was minimal.
So, Ray visited museums and unexplored niches to find out