In the mid 1970s, I became a background artist at Coffin & Company Motion Pictures, a commercial animation studio in Seattle. I bloomed under Jim Coffin's direction, concepting as part of his team of designers and animators. Our clients included The Weyerhauser Corporation, Virginia Mason Hospital, Pacific Northwest Bell and others. Jim kept us busy most of the time.

As I grew more independent and confident in my visual thinking, it became difficult to present ideas I believed in only to have a client dismiss them. This caused me to think apart from the commercial world of solving the client's needs, and looking into what I might create for myself individually without the overbearing intrusion of the client's gaze.

Prior to this, I hadn't thought of myself as a "fine artist". I wasn't an intellectual or a scholar; the art school I had attended in the late 1960s was specifically commercial in its application. However, even then my favorite instructor at the school was the design teacher Fred Griffin, a fine artist. 

Fred was a painter and materials fabricator and probably the first genius I'd ever met. His teaching of design was at a high level and well over my head at the time. We finally communicated through a book of old Flash Gordon comic strips from the 1930s. He used Raymond’s images to reveal the spectrum of visual relationships I had been looking at but had never seen.

The final revelation was seeing reproductions of the work of Mark Rothko. That was when I experienced my first sense of transcendence in art. I became less interested in the figure and more in the space surrounding the figure - the landscape.

While there were many years left to go in my maturation, I was eventually able to become, and remain, a fine artist.