Alexis Rockman's Visual Inspiration for "Life of Pi" Gabrielle Plucknette/The New York Times Artwork by Alexis Rockman For nearly three decades, Alexis Rockman has been painting what he calls "natural-history psychedelia" - dinosaurlike descendants of rabbits and roosters; a chimera of an alligator, a pigeon and a rat thrashing in a sewer (or depending on how you look at it, a flooded subway tunnel). In 2009, the director Ang Lee asked Rockman to produce visual inspiration for his movie "Life of Pi" (released Nov. 21), based on Yann Martel's novel about a boy's spiritual journey adrift at sea in a boat with a tiger. Knowing that the film would rely heavily on digital imaging, the filmmakers wanted a human hand to help visualize some of the "freaky biological fantasies" living in the water where the story takes place. Alexis Rockman at his studio in TriBeCa. Rockman's artwork for the film, the product of hundreds of sketches, can be seen above in the form of real and imagined aquatic species. He used gouache on black paper, which he had never done before. The art inspired a scene in the movie called "Tiger Vision," a nonverbal, hallucinatory trip that serves as an apparent mind meld between the protagonist, Pi, and the tiger. Rockman says it's akin to "what "Star Gate" was to "2001." " Rockman, whose art has appeared at the Brooklyn Museum and the Smithsonian, draws on his childhood fascination with the American Museum of Natural History, where his mother worked. Much of his artwork for "Life of Pi" will be on display at the Drawing Center in SoHo in September 2013.