Rockman was born and raised in New York City. Rockman's stepfather, Russell Rockman, an Australian jazz musician, brought the family to Australia frequently.[6] As a child, Rockman frequented the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where his mother, Diana Wall, worked briefly for anthropologist Margaret Mead.
Growing up, Rockman had an interest in natural history and science, and developed fascination for film, animation, and the arts.From 1980 to 1982, Rockman studied animation at the Rhode Island School of Design and continued studies at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, receiving a BFA in fine arts in 1985.
Aside from his art career, Rockman has taken on requests from conservation groups, including the Riverkeeperproject and the Rainforest Alliance. He lives with his wife, Dorothy Spears in Warren, CT and NYC.
Rockman began exhibiting his work at the Jay Gorney Modern Art gallery in New York City in 1986 and was represented by the gallery from 1986 to 2005. Rockman also had exhibitions at galleries in Los Angeles, Boston, and Philadelphia in the late 1980s.
Early work was inspired by natural history iconography. In Phylum, Rockman draws upon the work of Ernst Haeckel, an artist and proponent of Darwinism. A series of works by Rockman in the early 1990s, including Barnyard Scene (1990), Jungle Fever (1991), and The Trough (1992), use dark humor in depicting different species mating with one another. In Barnyard Scene, Rockman depicts a raccoon mating with a rooster, and Jungle Fever shows a praying mantis mating with a chipmunk. In 1993, Rockman created Still Life, a still life depiction of a pile of fish and marine specimens, evoking reference to 1935 horror James Whale film Bride of Frankenstein and films by Luis Bunuel. In Still Life, Rockman alludes to the Wunderkammer, placing "aberrant contents" amidst a Baroque still life scene, which traditionally is abundant with wealth and goods from Dutch and Spanish colonies.
In 1992, Rockman painted his first large scale painting, Evolution, which was exhibited at Sperone Westwater Gallery in 1992, the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Venice Biennale in 1993.
The Biosphere series, referencing Douglass Trumbull's seminal 1971 film Silent Running envisions a situation where the Earth has become too toxic for human life, and the last vestiges of nature are placed in geodesic domes on space ships roaming the outer reaches of our solar system. Biosphere also references the quasi-scientific experiment Biosphere 2 in Arizona.
