Paul Laffoley

Paul Laffoley
Portrait of Paul Laffoley by Elyse Harary [January 2015]
Born	August 14, 1935 Cambridge, Massachusetts
Died	November 16, 2015 (aged 80) Boston, Massachusetts
Nationality	American
Movement	Visionary Art
Website	http://paullaffoley.net

Paul Laffoley (August 14, 1935 – November 16, 2015) was an American visionary artist and architect from Boston, Massachusetts, represented by Kent Fine Art in New York.

Following his formal education in the classics at Brown and architectural studies at Harvard, Laffoley would begin to assimilate and systematically cross-pollinate his related strands of intellectual inquiry. In a search for expanded opportunities, he went to New York in 1963 to work with the visionary artist and architect Frederick Kiesler, and was also recruited to view late-night TV for Andy Warhol in exchange for a place to sleep. Weekdays, Laffoley found employment with Emery Roth & Sons where he worked on the plans for the yet to be built World Trade Center Towers before being terminated upon his suggestion of bridges joining the two buildings.

At that time, Laffoley had been painting in the basement of his family home in Belmont on the weekends, completing his first fully mature vision: The Kali-Yuga: The End of the Universe at 424826 A.D. From this point forward, Laffoley began to formulate his unique trans-disciplinary approach to a new discipline combining, philosophy, science, architecture and spirituality to the practice of painting. Laffoley first began to organize his ideas in a format related to eastern mandalas, partially inspired by the late night patterns he watched for Warhol on late night television. This quickly developed into four general subcategories of paintings: operating systems, psychotronic devices, meta-energy, time travel, and lucid dreaming. Conceived of as "structured singularities", Laffoley never works in series, but rather approaches each project as a unique schematic. Working in a solitary lifestyle, each 73 ½ x 73 ½ inch canvas would take up to three years to paint and code. By the late 1980s, Laffoley began to move from the spiritual and the intellectual, to the view of his work as an interactive, physically engaging psychotronic device, a modern approach to trans-disciplinary enlightenment and its spiritual aura.