Stephen Mueller, a New York painter who expanded and refined the vocabulary of 1960s Color Field painting into deliriously buoyant mystical-comic works, died Sept. 16 in Manhattan. He was 63.

The cause was cancer, his sister, Debra Pendleton, said.

Mueller’s mature paintings, which took shape in the early 1990s, were cross-cultural hybrids that presaged many current concerns in abstract painting, most importantly its scant interest in being purely abstract.

Mixing motifs distilled from tantric art, Indian and Persian miniatures, and Mexican ceramics and cartoons, his paintings combined a dizzying array of references and allusions with striking formal contrasts and a brilliant palette. It all might have been overwhelming except for the care with which he constructed his compositions, spatially and chromatically.

Typically, his paintings presented several symmetrical, hard-edged, sometimes aura-ringed forms hovering at different depths in atmospheric washes of glowing or graduated color, their curvaceous silhouettes evoking Buddhist shrines, meditating Bodhisattvas, mosque domes or lotus blossoms.

Patterns were used sparingly but could occur at any juncture: shapes might be striped or latticed; vaporous backgrounds might be laid on in perpendicular fuzzy bands, forming bright, blurry plaids.

The effect, guided by a feel for artificial color influenced by Warhol, was of a jazzed-up yet serene mysticism. The critic and painter Joe Fyfe, writing in the catalog for a survey of Mueller’s work at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Neb., in 2003, called Mueller a Symbolist whose “work tells us that meaning is ungraspable but that we must enthusiastically search for it.”

Mueller was born in Norfolk, Va., on Sept. 24, 1947, and grew up in Dallas. He earned a B.F.A. in painting from the University of Texas, Austin, in 1969 and went to graduate school at Bennington College in Vermont.

He had his first solo show at the Richard Feigen Gallery in New York in 1970, while still at Bennington. After graduating, he moved to New York, where he lived for the rest of his life.