With a career spanning over three decades, internationally acclaimed artist Alexis Rockman is well known for his complex, large scale paintings and works on paper depicting the collision between civilization and nature. The artist synthesizes elements of human history, natural science and landscape painting; a passionate interest in climate change and globalization; and a healthy dose of art history and science fiction, to create images that reveal our world balancing on the precipice. Beyond their lush surfaces, radiant washes of color, and technical inventiveness belies a dark humor, an intense curiosity and a probing intelligence that serves to heighten the power and urgency of his invented narratives. Works on Paper is the first comprehensive survey of the artist's graphic work, documenting his extraordinary accomplishments as a draftsman through a meticulous selection of watercolors, gouaches, oil drawings, field studies, and sketchbooks. Designed in close collaboration with the artist, the book reproduces 120 works, many of which have never before been published. Included are his earliest watercolors from the 1980s, often of hybrid and mutated animals; Field Drawings, created in Guyana and other remote locations from mud sourced on site; the ominously beautiful and apocalyptic Weather Drawings; painterly works relating to his epic The Great Lakes Cycle; and Lost at Sea, his most recent body of work reimagining famed and historic shipwrecks. The book includes a visual appendix of Rockman's graphic influences, with commentary by the artist. Works on Paper is a valuable addition to scholarship on the artist, providing a critical understanding of a visionary oeuvre made at the intersection of art, nature and science.

Packing an off-kilter sense of humor and keen scientific minds, authors Margaret Mittelbach and Michael Crewdson take off with renowned artist Alexis Rockman on a postmodern safari. Their mission? Tracking down the elusive Tasmanian tiger. This mysterious, striped predator was once the world's largest carnivorous marsupial. It had a pouch like a kangaroo and a jaw that opened impossibly wide to reveal terrifying choppers. Tragically, this rare and powerful animal was hunted into extinction in the early part of the twentieth century. Or was it?
Journeying first to the Australian mainland and then south to the wild island of Tasmania, these young naturalists brave a series of bizarre misadventures and uproarious wildlife encounters in their obsessive search for the long-lost beast.
From an ancient cave featuring an aboriginal painting of the tiger to a lab in Sydney where maverick scientists are trying to resurrect the animal through cloning, this intrepid trio comes face-to-face with blood-sucking land leeches and venomous bull ants, a misbehaving wallaby who invades their motel room, and a crew of flesh-eating, bone-crunching Tasmanian devils gorging on roadkill.
They bond with trappers, bushwackers, and wildlife experts who refuse to abandon the tiger hunt, despite the paucity of evidence. Sifting through local myths, bar-room banter, and historical accounts, these environmental detectives sweep readers into a world where platypus' swim, kangaroos roam, and a large predator with a pouch was-or perhaps still is-queen of the jungle.
Filled with Alexis Rockman's stunning drawings of flora and fauna--made from soil, wombat scat, and the artist's own blood-Carnivorous Nightsis a hip and hilarious account of an unhinged safari, as well as a fascinating portrayal of a wildly unique part of the world.

"From the Hardcover edition.