David Rock’s paintings are displayed in some of the most visited galleries and houses in town. Whether his work will be considered enduring is another question. But it is, unquestionably, durable.
It has to be, considering that his meticulous, leaf-by-leaf landscape paintings often are hosed down daily and sometimes scrubbed with brushes and vinegar solutions.
You can see Rock’s most recent work at Gallery 6 at 1200 S. Lake Shore Drive. It also is displayed in the houses of prominent Chicago residents at 2200 N. Cannon Drive, not to mention in the home of some of suburbia’s most upstanding citizens at 8400 W. 31st St. in Brookfield.
Those are the addresses, respectively, of the Shedd Aquarium, Lincoln Park Zoo and Brookfield Zoo.
Rock, of Tucson, an artist turned building contractor who returned to painting 11 years ago, is the Michelangelo of zoo mural painters.
If you’ve admired the colorful background depictions of tropical rain forests in the primate house at Lincoln Park Zoo, you’re already a fan of Rock’s. His murals also grace the walls of the lion house and the bird house.
Or maybe you’ve been caught up by the sweeping panorama of African plains inside the building housing giraffes in Habitat Africa at Brookfield Zoo. That’s Rock’s handiwork, too.
This year he transformed two narrow spaces into deep, luxuriant forests in Gallery 6, which houses freshwater tropical fish at the Shedd Aquarium.
The first was the Asian River exhibit, unveiled in September; it re-creates a tropical rain forest riverbank in Thailand as it appeared 1,000 years ago. Rock’s mural blends with real plants so that a viewer has the illusion of staring into infinity through layers of a triple canopied jungle.
The new Australian lungfish exhibit at the Shedd features a Rock background mural of a eucalyptus forest. It melds with the exhibit’s re-creation of a 14-foot stretch of riverbank of the Brisbane River in Australia, where lungfish live in the wild.
“There aren’t many people who do this kind of work,” said Jon Coe, a Philadelphia architect whose firm, Coe, Lee, Robinson & Roesch, specializes in zoo and museum design.
“Very few can do it well, and the one most people call first when they have a job is David Rock. He is the most highly thought-of muralist in the zoo field.”
While it may seem like an unusual way of making a living, it is an ideal occupation for Rock, 41, who balances his artistic sensibilities with business practicalities. Rock grew up in Oregon, and his great passion has always been hiking and camping. Now he finds himself traveling to rain forests and deserts to do research for his paintings.
“I’ve painted habitats for just about every imaginable creature,” he said in an interview as he put the finishing touches on the lungfish exhibit recently. “Spiders, bugs, birds, fish, mammals, reptiles.”
Painting habitats also keeps him busy; he’s on the road at least nine months of the year.
The list of zoos and aquariums that have commissioned his work stretches across the country. They range from the Bronx and Central Park Zoos in New York to zoos and aquariums in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Seattle, Tacoma, Wash., and Portland, Ore.
The greatest concentration of his work is in Chicago. That is because the three big institutions here that display animals have in the past several years embarked on ambitious expansion and renovation projects.
Three years ago, Lincoln Park became the first to commission Rock; the zoo will have him back in 1994 to do work on its small mammal-reptile house renovations.
A teaching tool
Whether fixing up an old exhibit or creating a new one, zoos and aquariums are trying to go beyond simply providing a comfortable space for the animals they keep. Their aim is to tell the public something about not just the animal in the exhibit but also the animal’s wild habitat and the importance of protecting wilderness areas.
With space always at a premium, keepers rely on a combination of real and artificial rockwork, plants and background murals to suggest the natural habitats of the animals.
Rock uses a sort of photo-realism technique to depict plantlife, and his skill and speed are much sought after.
His assignment with the Shedd’s lungfish exhibit was to blend his background depiction of a eucalyptus forest with the exhibit’s real eucalyptus trees, shrubs and grasses growing along the artificial riverbank in the exhibit.
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To create his work, Rock primarily uses airbrushes commonly found in auto body shops. In the lungfish exhibit, he worked from detailed photographs of an actual spot along the Brisbane River supplied by the Shedd.
He first airbrushed a rough sketch showing the horizon line and larger foreground trees. After the aquarium’s design department approved the “rough,” he painted in the trees and general terrain.
From a distance, his trees and grasses look crisp and real. Closer up, you can see the fuzzy, indistinct edges made with the airbrush, making most of the mural look like an out-of-focus photograph.
Illusion surrounds animals
That’s perfect for the exhibitor, because it means that while the background suggests something real in nature, it directs the viewer’s attention to the living animal in the exhibit.
Rock uses a trompe l’oeil trick to add to the illusion. In the areas where his mural plants abut real plants, he gets out his brushes to gradually paint his foliage into so fine a focus that it’s hard to see where the mural stops and real plants start.
“That adds to the feeling of depth in confined spaces,” he said.
The airbrush works not just because it gives him the blurry effect he needs, Rock said, but also because it allows him to work very fast. He finished the lungfish exhibit in 12 days.
“If I couldn’t do it quickly, it would really be too prohibitively expensive for zoos to put this sort of thing into their exhibits,” he said.
Some of Rock’s favorite exhibits are those that have no real plantlife, only sculptured trees and vines and his murals, such in Lincoln Park Zoo’s primate house. Those exhibits are striking, as though the viewer is watching gorgeous, living animals moving around inside a color postcard photo of lush, vibrant jungle foliage.
“The animals don’t react at all to the painting,” he said of the primate exhibits. “My pictures are there to inform people and to take people’s minds off the walls that enclose the exhibit, which is, in reality, a completely cement environment. Other than the animals, there is no living material in the exhibits.”
Because animals live in his creations, Rock has to take special care with the materials he works with, starting with an epoxy primer as a foundation.
“I paint with an ordinary, latex acrylic house paint,” he said. “It works well, because it withstands water, ultraviolet light and a lot of other things. I finish it off with a non-toxic sealant.”
The painting material has to be tough enough to withstand a daily, high-pressure hosing routinely done for hygienic purposes for some animals, like the big cats. Some cat species, like jaguars, spray parts of their exhibits as they instinctively mark their territory, leaving a scent that has to be removed daily with a scrub-down of vinegar.
A mural in a bat exhibit on the East Coast zoo gets such a thick coat of bat guano each night that the painting has to be scrubbed vigorously each night. At Brookfield, the resident giraffes, with their huge, sandpapery tongues, have taken to licking at the leaves of the acacia trees Rock painted into the mural.
“With the modern epoxies and paints we have available today, my paintings are really pretty durable,” Rock said. “They should last as long as the walls of the exhibits do.”
Rock received a degree in art at Lewis and Clark University in Oregon, but once he graduated, he dropped art and went into the construction business.
“I didn’t figure you could make a living as a painter,” he said.
A perfect marriage
But he married a sculptor, and his wife, Jonquil, went to work for a company that makes artificial rocks and trees for zoo displays. That business was such a perfect marriage of Rock’s own skills as an artist and builder that he eventually joined the company, settling in as a full-time muralist.
Eventually, Rock and his wife started their own company. But his mural work has undeniably rekindled the dreams of his youth to create art.
“I’m never really very happy with anything I’ve painted,” he said, sounding almost apologetic. “It’s a business, and you get paid only so much, so you have to get it done and move on.
“You can’t afford to paint it until you love it perfectly, so I never like to go back and see something I’ve done. All I see are the faults and mistakes I wish I could have corrected.
“But I’m growing. I’m getting better.”
He said his wife gave him a 2-by-3-foot blank canvas several months ago and told him to get started on painting something to please himself. He tried, but couldn’t-the canvas was too small.
“Doing murals, I just got used to working on a huge scale, and I like it,” he said.
At first he never signed his work, but now, at least when finishing big projects, he paints his name where the public can’t see it. But animal keepers can, “so they will remember me.”
“There is an artistic satisfaction in it, certainly,” he said.