Paul Laffoley
(1935–2016)
Place bornCambridge, England
Place diedBoston, Massachusetts
BiographyPaul Laffoley’s fascination with art commenced in secondary school. From his Greek and Roman studies, he learned the inherent possibilities in diagrammatic structures; making information more comprehensible through outlines and developing systems were two of these possibilities. Laffoley remained essentially self-taught until he received two apprenticeships. The first apprenticeship was with sculptor Mirko Basaldella, who Laffoley met while enrolled at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. After being kicked out of Harvard for having “deviant ideas,” Laffoley moved to New York City in 1962, and obtained a second apprenticeship with the visionary artist and architect Frederick Kiesler. Laffoley was looking for work and met Andy Warhol, who allowed him to stay at his firehouse studio in exchange for watching late-night television test patterns. The test patterns led Laffoley to look at religious mandalas, the Hindu and Buddhist cosmic diagrams, which he would adapt to use as the main compositional structure for most of his paintings. Then he began to pursue the visionary genre. In 1971, he founded the Boston Visionary Cell. Although mostly known for his paintings, he also created sculptures, developed architectural projects, originated inventions, and wrote extensively. His relationship to writing was found to be far more dynamic and voluminous after his death in 2015, when a vast trove of notes and unpublished manuscripts was discovered in his studio. These texts include plays, critical writings, treatises, architectural proposals, outlines for lectures, autobiographical writings, and philosophical essays.As a transdisciplinary artist, Laffoley used writing as a tool for various purposes. His texts explore recurrent topics such as alchemy and utopia, themes consistently developed in his artworks. His “thought-forms” accompany his paintings and are used as a tool to decode symbols and elucidate content. He also wrote complete books, including The Principles of Alchemy (1972) and The Levogyre (1976–1990). The topics of these major textual works reappear as subjects in various later paintings and manuscripts. Laffoley explained that, within each one of his paintings, there are at least fifty other paintings.
Laffoley’s art has a visionary purpose: it seeks oneness. His oeuvre’s symbols, forms, and content all refer to a connection with time through “the eternal now” of the past, the present, and the future. Although many discontinuities are experienced in the history of the physical universe, Laffoley restores continuity by illustrating that the physical and the metaphysical aspects of the universe are one. Alchemy allows the perfect method to communicate this oneness.
Elyse Benenson, “Paul Laffoley. Thought-Forms: Diagrams for a Vernacular Language,” in Vestiges & Verse: Notes from the Newfangled Epic, ed. Valérie Rousseau (New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2018).