Paul Laffoley

1935-2015 · Boston, Massachusetts, USA

From a one-room Boston studio he called the Boston Visionary Cell, he painted enormous diagrams for time travel and cosmic architecture, and wore a lion’s paw where his right foot had been.

The life

Laffoley was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1935, took honours at Brown, and left Harvard’s architecture programme early. In New York he worked with the visionary architect Frederick Kiesler and was famously hired to watch late-night television for Andy Warhol in exchange for lodging. In 1968 he founded the Boston Visionary Cell, the studio where he lived and worked for decades. He proposed a Freedom Tower design inspired by Gaudí’s Sagrada Família, and after losing his lower right leg in 2001 he wore a prosthesis shaped as a lion’s paw, made by the Hollywood effects artist Stan Winston, in honour of his star sign. He died in Boston in 2015.

The work

Huge, symmetrical canvases, often taking years each, that fuse painting with engineering drawing: mandala-like schematics laid out in oil, ink and vinyl lettering, mapping time travel, higher dimensions, alchemy and the architecture of the universe. They read like instruction manuals for machines that do not yet exist. His work is held by the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Hirshhorn Museum and the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore.

Why we love them

He treated the entire cosmos as a design brief and delivered the blueprints. Nobody has ever painted with more ambition per square inch.

Go deeper

• Paul Laffoley at the Outsider Art Fair
• Paul Laffoley on Wikipedia
• The Official Paul Laffoley Website
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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