Thomas Lyon Mills
For more than
25 years Thomas Lyon Mills has painted in the Italian catacombs and numerous
European pagan sites. He is represented by the Ricco Maresca Gallery in New
York and the Rafius Fane Gallery in Boston. He has exhibited at The Drawing
Center in New York; The DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, MA; The
Boston Athenaeum; the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY;
the Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock, AR; and numerous venues in Europe
including the American Academy in Rome and the residence of the US Ambassador
in Italy. He has lectured and critiqued at Harvard University’s Graduate School
of Design; the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville; the Cranbrook Academy of
Art, MI; Parsons School of Design, NY; Auburn University, AL; and both Temple
University’s and Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute’s programs in Rome. In 1996
he received RISD’s John R. Frazier Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Academic research/areas of interest
For years
Mills has painted in the Italian catacombs and mithraeums, where he is the only
non-archeologist with permission to explore and work alone. What does he find
underground? Miles of tunnels so silent that he hears his heartbeat. Skeletons
embrace one another in tombs; paintings and carvings form mysterious,
iconographic hybrids of an emerging language. Worm-like creatures with
millipede-like legs coexist with 10-inch phosphorescent mantises that glow with
green light. Blind spiders the size of his hand make clicking sounds as they
traverse the walls of the silent tunnels.
Mills’s dreams, which he documents in sketchbooks, are often prophetic harbingers of where he needs to explore next. Working for years on his paintings, drawings and prints, he transforms all of his underground sites into one world—one cosmology—on a threshold where the seen and the unseen coexist. Time is elastic, continuous and circular. This is his preferred world, the shadow world of memory, time and dreams.
- Thomas Lyon Mills
- Professor
- [email protected]
- 401-454-6176
- BFA, Cleveland Institute of Art
- MFA, Cranbrook Academy of Art