Tackling climate change, artist's career is red hot

Alexis Rockman's paintings combine Abstract-Expressionist and realist elements to depict global warming and natural disasters. (Dina Rudick/Globe Staff)

WALTHAM - Painter Alexis Rockman grew up wandering the halls of the Museum of Natural History, where his mother worked as an archaeologist. When he was 7, he traveled to Peru with her and learned about the Incas.

"I understood that civilization came and went," he says. "I didn't have a sense of it being indelible."

At the museum, the dioramas, filled with dinosaurs and woolly mammoths in their native environments, captivated him.

The lessons he learned then have contributed to a career that's accelerating at light speed. Rockman's solo exhibit "The Weight of Air" is now at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis, his largest museum showing yet. In the Berkshires, his 30-foot long, seven-piece mural of Antarctica is on view at "Badlands," a landscape show at Mass MoCA. And at 45, he's a cover boy: Look for his watercolor of penguins on the cover of this month's ArtNews magazine.

Sizzle.

He flashes a gleaming, self-deprecating smile. "I feel like I'm coming into a modest moment," he says during a recent interview at the Rose. Rockman has movie-star good looks, with a chiseled face, tousled hair, and a lean frame. And even though he didn't grow up to follow in his mother's footsteps as an archaeologist, he does have an Indiana Jones streak - he's genial but laconic, research-oriented, and prone to adventure, taking research trips around the world.

The works at the Rose and at Mass MoCA mark a painterly turn for Rockman, whose last big splash came in 2004 with "Manifest Destiny," a 24-foot mural depicting a devastating vision of the Port of New York circa 3000. In it, the stanchions of the Brooklyn Bridge are crumbling and overgrown; the span is gone. The skies burn orange, and odd creatures populate the water. The scene is painted with excruciating, realistic detail. It took him seven years to complete.

There's nothing sci-fi about his current work, other than that the impact of climate change and natural disasters have a sci-fi aura to them. Rockman has burst out of the shackles of realism to revel in the possibilities of paint on watercolor paper.

He applies paint with abandon, using tools such as turkey basters, eye droppers, toothbrushes, and sponges. He depicts landslides, waterspouts, hurricanes, crumbling Arctic ice, and other weather-related phenomena. The paintings look like Abstract Expressionist works, save that along the edges he applies his talent for realist rendering, adding oil derricks, swimming pools, and mountain shacks, tiny in scale alongside the daunting forces of nature.

"This is the aftermath of 'Manifest Destiny,' " Rockman says, looking around the gallery at the Rose. "It's a response to the seven years I worked on that piece. I was so sick of painting a very specific building. . . . I wanted to get the same kind of content, but not as much information."

That content has a pointed political agenda about global warming, a longtime subject for Rockman.

"I'm very worried," he says. "My feelings have changed over the last 10 years. I'm cautiously hopeful about culture shifting to take it seriously. I'm skeptical that corporate America will do the right thing."

Weather - visually operatic, so affected by climate change - was the perfect next step. "I want to paint about alchemy and intuition, which you can't do when you're painting architecture," he says.

The exhibition came along with the Rose's 2008 Ruth Ann and Nathan Perlmutter Artist in Residence Award (although the artist was never technically in residence), and he has spent the afternoon hobnobbing with Ruth Ann Perlmutter. At a reception in his honor, over pizza squares and vegetarian sushi, he quietly commands the room. The guests, who are mostly women, murmur admiringly to one another and move toward him in small groups. Surely it's to talk about his art, but Rockman has a magnetism that makes women, and maybe men as well, happy to be in his presence.

The artist allows that he likes people. "I just hate humanity," he says.

Rockman does a great deal of research on the Internet, collaging digital files in Photoshop before he paints. But he's also a globe trekker. For the Mass MoCA show, he traveled to Antarctica last November. His eco-cruise ship was the first vessel on the scene when another ship sank off Antarctica. In his slide lecture at the Brandeis reception, he mentions a trip to Guyana that he took with fellow artist Mark Dion.

"We were camping with nothing but a fishing rod and a bag of rice," Rockman recounts. "I wanted to go into the field and not have received ideas."

Rose director Michael Rush organized the exhibit. "He's amazingly talented," gushes Rush. "I saw his works from this climate series and was blown away. I went to his studio, and he had several tacked to his wall. I flipped out. On the spot, I said 'I want to show these.' "

That was a year ago. Rockman, painting with a fast-drying oil medium on paper, has to work swiftly. "He was producing rapidly," Rush continues. "Within months, they had been sold and spread around the world. They caught on. The collections represented here are among the major ones in the country."

Rush is pleased to have caught Rockman as he makes a dramatic shift from realism to abstraction. "You have someone known for these natural-history renderings, imaginative, phantasmagoric," he says. "To see him moving in such a radically developed different direction is very exciting. . . . In a sense, he's saying, 'I'm really letting go.' "

You could say the art world has finally caught up to Rockman, who has been making paintings about natural history, climate change, and the impact humans have on the biosphere ever since he started painting in the early 1980s. At the time, painting was passé.

"It was a Kosutharama," he says, referring to conceptual, text-based artist Joseph Kosuth. "Everything was Minimalism and Conceptualism. I didn't have that axe to grind. Then German Pop artists started showing - [Gerhard] Richter, [Sigmar] Polke, and I thought, 'What if I do a natural-history version of Pop Art?' "

Rockman delved into old field guides, eating up the detailed information. He began to paint weird animal hybrids in the late 1980s, a decade or more before such creatures came into vogue in art. Unlike many artists today who depict mutants, Rockman put them in natural habitats.

"He sees landscape and nature from a scientific perspective, but he's also akin to Hudson River School painters, looking at the landscape and being in it," says Denise Markonish, curator of "Badlands."

Rockman went on his cruise soon after Markonish invited him to join that show. He had made several Antarctic paintings before his trip, based on Internet images. Being there was better.

"It's so weirdly luminous," Rockman says, looking at "Iceberg I," which has a riveting turquoise glow. "Light comes at you from below," he says.

Markonish says the way Rockman uses his material aligns with what he depicts. "Icebergs are a thick impasto, but the sky is gray, flatter, with a marble texture. It has a visceral sense to it."

Rockman lets his medium be his guide. "What can you do with this material?" he says of paint. "You can do evaporation, a mudslide, eroded riverbeds. There's a dramatic power to it, and you let it do all the work for you."