Art: Paul Laffoley

I am uncertain if his work is objective but it is certainly inspires a profound reaction inside of me. It has an entheogen flavor with universal themes. He has some questionable theories and beliefs but don't we all?





Laffoley attended Brown University, graduating in 1962 with honors in Classics, Philosophy, and Art History.

In 1963, he attended the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and apprenticed with the sculptor Mirko Basaldella before being dismissed from the institution. He was dismissed for "conceptual deviance", after the majority of his designs were given a grade that designates the project not as good or bad, but as 'currently technologically or physically impossible'.

Thereafter, he moved to New York to apprentice with the visionary architect Friedrich Kiesler. He was also hired for the design team of the World Trade Center, but was soon after fired by the chief architect, Minoru Yamasaki, for his unconventional ideas. He had apparently always been quite an 'unconventional' person. By Laffoley's account, he spoke his first word ("Constantinople") at the age of six months, and then lapsed into 4 years of silence, having been diagnosed with slight Autism. Laffoley has written that, in his senior year at Brown, he was given eight electric-shock treatments. As a child he attended the progressive Mary Lee Burbank School in Belmont, Massachusetts, where his draftsman's talent was ridiculed by his Abstract Expressionist teachers.

Laffoley later began work (and live) in an eighteen-by-thirty foot utility room to found the Boston Visionary Cell, where he continued for nearly 41 years.
In 1965, he completed the first paintings of a mature style in the household basement against the wishes of his father. Christmas (1968), after a quarrel with a first studio partner, Laffoley was in immediate need of a studio and living accommodations. Having only one day to relocate, Paul found an empty room on the second floor of a downtown office building at 36 Bromfield Street in Boston, and immediately moved in.

This studio would become infamously known as the Boston Visionary Cell (formally incorporated in 1971 as a non-profit art association encouraging art and architecture of the visionary genre). The room was stacked from floor to ceiling with books, journals, religious artifacts, diagrams, more books .. and of course dozens of paintings. Visitors reported seeing minimal or no kitchen arrangements and according to some there was NO BED, just the drafting table, art supplies and all the books.

Now clearly following his path as a painter, he began a highly original approach to the construction of the painted surface. Based on extensive hand written journals documenting his research, diagrams, and footnoted predecessors to various theoretical developments, Laffoley began to first organize his ideas in a format related to eastern mandalas that had captivated his interest in the spiritual. This format quickly developed into Laffoley’s three sub-groupings of work: Operating Systems, psychotronic Devices and their related Lucid Dreams. Conceived of as “structured singularities”, Laffoley never works in series, but rather approaches each project freshly, and individually.