Art/ Thomas Lyon Mills

Thomas Lyon Mills
10 1/2 Maps
Luise Ross Gallery NYC May 2007

The first impression upon entering into the principal room of the Luise Ross Gallery filled with the works on paper of Thomas Lyon Mills is of being enfolded into an exquisitely soft-textured and subtle-hued drapery of ancient Chinese landscape imagery. One is immediately aware of being in the presence of a rich and intelligent imaginative interpretation of the idea of "place". The real-life places from which Mr. Mills derives his inspiration are the enclosed wetlands and sky-free hills of the Adirondacks and the subterranean catacombs of Rome, earthy locations that impart a rustic "dug up", archaeological quality.

To say that these works are dream-like is true in many different ways: how the image vocabulary commingles (corridors sprout out of tree trunks as in "Convex Map", 2001-2006), or the way each work is cobbled together from several separate pages of different types and kinds of paper. As in a dream, where there is no such thing as a non-sequitur, the imagery transitions from one natural or architectural observation to another with a Piranesi-esque precision ambling over the different-sized pieced pages, suggesting a languorous but scrupulous idea of time: it is all-time, but also, exactly, this-time.

In "Val's Woodrick" (2000-2006) a cantilevered wooden shed is partially pictured in three different locations from three different positions, at different degrees of execution, again suggesting time and variety of recollection. It looks like a hermit-scholar's retreat from a Sung dynasty scroll, except that it is a humble dark brown cabin that one might recall from childhood, or last week. Areas of openness on the pages seem to speak not so much of either possibility or forgetting or erasure, as of the beginning of remembering anew, which could spring up anywhere and work its way seamlessly into the existing design.

All of these works resonate with the watery aspect of the medium and the idea of an endless pool of imagination and experience and the startling realization that each painting grew into its present state over an average period of five years. Images bob to the surface here and there and seem to leak over the pages, assemble and configure into meaning before they disperse, and continue the cycle. These works are like a mystic pool where imagery floats up from below as much as it reflects from above, caught for a moment on the intangible surface.

Mr. Mills refers to them as "maps" and, like a dream, or an ancient vase re-configured from multiple shards, they seem to be trying to tell us something about where we have come from, something about how to understand where we are, where we are going, and, of course, they are buried treasure come to light.