For over 30 years, Thomas Lyon Mills has been the only non-archeologist with permission to explore and paint alone in the Italian catacombs. Mills has also received unique access to paint in Mithraeums, in the temple ruins of the unknown civilization at Gabii, in Etruscan tombs down hill-sides hidden in forests, and up in a mountainous Paleolithic cave. With his on-site work and the influence of his dreams, he returns to his studio to work on pieces often for years.
In the catacombs, miles of tunnels are so silent that he hears his own heartbeat. Skeletons embrace one another in tombs; paintings and carvings form a nascent visual language. Blind translucent spiders coexist with 10-inch phosphorescent mantises that glow with green light.
In addition Mills has thousands of drawings made in museums and ancient churches, underground archeological sites, and a "secret" forest wetland in the Adirondack mountains. The studio is where these images are essential aggregates to his work underground.
Most importantly he keeps a library of unconscious states, documenting his dreams for the past 45 years in bedside sketchbooks with narratives and drawings that are often startlingly prophetic. With all of this data he works for long stretches of time on his paintings, drawings, and prints, transforming them into one world where the visible and invisible coexist and time is no longer linear, but rather elastic, circular, and liminal.
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"Like a mapmaker, I find that my paintings inevitably cross over into the unknown. This then, is my region—where the visible meets the invisible and where the seen pays a constant debt to the unseen."
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"In her novel The Abyss, Marguerite Yourcenar quotes an alchemical dictum: obscurum per obscurius; ignotum per ignotius, which roughly translates: "proceed toward the obscure and unknown through the still more obscure and unknown."
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MATERIALS and PROCESS
I love paper. I can piece it, tear it and fold it. I can add and subtract it. It travels with ease into the narrowest, hard-to-reach tunnels underground. My paper and watercolors remain damp due to the high humidity below ground and disintegrate—in the best sense—under repeated erasing and sanding. Back in my studio I often work on my papers for years, growing and shrinking them as the images coalesce. Sometimes woodcuts and etchings, found objects, paper scraps and children’s drawings are introduced like musical instruments, to further orchestrate psychic necessities. In addition I have thousands of drawings made in museums and ancient churches, in myriad archeological sites, and amongst a "secret" forest wetland in the Adirondack mountains. The studio is the perfect place for these images (including my dreams) to "join hands".
Thus, all of my work is transformed into one world—one cosmology. This is my preferred world, the shadow world of memory, time, and the primordial. -
YEARS UNDERGROUND IN ROMEI consider Rome my spiritual home, especially its underground, given how my dreams have become one with its palimpsest. With official permission, I explore and paint alone in many archeological sites, especially the catacombs—burial sites for Rome’s early Christian and Jewish population.
I first moved to Rome in 1989 as a young professor at the Rhode Island School of Design when I was chosen to be the academic head of the college’s European Honors Program. Since then, I have lived in Rome for a total of nine years adding together sabbaticals and summers.
Catacombs exist in absolute darkness, with a silence so complete I can hear my heartbeat. In the catacombs, time is no longer linear, but rather elastic, circular and liminal. Trees and mosses dissolve into tunnels and roots. Walls go transparent, tilt and levitate. Apparitions abound.In the studio I cross-pollinate my catacomb paintings with other sites in which I have worked: Mythraeums (caves of the sun god Mithras where worship included animal sacrifices) and innumerable other pagan sites. I have gone high up into the Pantheon’s inner rooms and down into the lower regions of the Colosseum and its connected Cloaca Maxima (in Latin, Greatest Sewer). I made drawings on the ceiling restoration of the Sistine Chapel. I have worked throughout Italy, Turkey, Russia, and in Mexico. My work in Greece has taken me to the Cycladic quarries on Paros and Naxos (now forgotten like extinct volcanoes) and to the top of the Parthenon in Athens.In the Adirondack Mountains I work in a swamp that reminds me of the underground with its watery smells, populated by iridescent moss-covered yellow birches. -
Artwork Photography: Philippi Photographi
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21 January
This night.
Night rain.
Drink my tears, she says.Drench the soil.
Seep into tunnels
Where roots hang
Like chiroptera.Fill your veins to overflowing, she says,
Until my nectar drips –My nectar that blinks bright
Like night’s fireflies,
Calling the sleeping hordes to rise,
Wave after wave,
And break the silence with sandaled feet.2013
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The Vessel Song
Chant “Old beyond old time”
Slow even breaths now
Don’t fight it: sleep.
The recurring dream returns,
Again the Augean dreamdig
Inside
Layers of turf, soil and stone,
Paper, plastic, and rustnails lie
where all things tremble and hide.
Fight in the dank dark deep
Pull it scratch it yank it
Soilstonetrash, deeproots and moist moss
centipedes white flies worms spiders
Wrestle with you but you
Morewrestle
From its refuge the amphora older than old.
Burnish your bright night vessel with moist moss
as centipedes white flies worms and spiders
inscribe your vessel with swirling figures.
Thus your prized vase, so perfect;
Sob and fill it with salty tears
As it chants back to you “old beyond” every night,
Your tears and vessel crumble into pigment and you begin to
Paint.
2021
