Thomas Lyon Mills at Luise Ross

In Rome over the years, Thomas Lyon Mills has obtained permission to pass countless hours in places that are not always accessible to the public: Early Christian catacombs long under lock and key; a large ancient Mithraeum adjoining tunnels under the Baths of Caracalla; passageways beneath the Colosseum; the 5th-century church of Santa Maria Antiqua on the Roman Forum. In his native New York State, he retreats to a hidden spot in the Adirondacks, a natural sanctuary where, as in Rome, he absorbs the spiritual energies of the locale. For Mills, these sites invite contemplation, coalescing time, memory and other intangibles. He records in copious notes his impressions of these places and of the pre-16th-century art that deeply moves him, along with transcriptions each morning of his dreams. All find their way into his dense, middling- to large-scale mixed-medium drawings, which reveal their multilayered secrets slowly and incompletely to the beholder.

The drawings may be worked on for a period of years. Shapes materialize as if through a process of geological accretion and erosion, with old marks erased to make room for new ones on what become heavily abraded surfaces. The images are generally dark dream spaces with forms dissolving into amorphous browns and blacks. Occasionally, mists of acrid hues waft by or bright light shines in through a chink. In his damp and silent places, weird fauna and flora appear, of unusual shapes and colors. Some seem to glow in the dark.

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Mills's spaces are always in flux. Prayer 53 (1995-2005), shaped like a Tau cross, evokes a catacomb tunnel filled with purple vapors--the kind painted by Redon, another visionary--which rise from the bottom of the composition in the wake of a transparent ghost with its head thrown back. Snake Lady (2002-06) is a narrow vertical composition in which a diaphanous face with two eyes and no other features, wrapped in a halo of light, is perched on top of a tall body shaped like a wave on the verge of breaking. A quality of osmosis is conveyed through Mills's palette of mauves, black, brown and white, in effects reminiscent of fantasy art. Things seem to turn into liquid and mist before our very eyes, suggesting an otherworldly force that conditions the works of nature and man.

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