You can call it another lonely day...............
Outsiders in art , the lonely ones plowing their own furrow , going their own way. Sometime last week I caught up with a programme on BBC 2 - ' Imagine ' - a late night magazine programme on the Arts , this particular one on ' outsiders ' , those who produce art solely through their own driven needs , way outside the normal , conservative , gallery /dealer system that seems to so much to dictate what is ' in '...... a lot of the artists featured were autistic or in other ways socially disfunctional to the extent that ' art - the act of creation ' was to a large extent their sole means of expression . Some I liked , some I didn't like , but a fascinating programme.
....And then I came across the work of Paul Laffoley.
...Outsider ?....................the nearest work to this I suppose would be Tantric art , mechanical diagrams ?, architectural blueprints ? instruction manuals ?............or the drawings of A.T. Mann , whose work I have always admired , having come across them some thirty or forty years ago...............
......Outsider ?.....Visionary .?....... born 1940 , he started working in New York as an architect , wanting to design flying saucers and worked on the World Trade Centre towers , although he didn't become a registered architect until he was 50 .
When he was 52 , in preparation for major oral surgery , he was subjected to a routine cat-scan of his head, at which point a miniature metallic-like ' implant ' was discovered in his brain near the pineal gland . a local chapter of MUFON declared it to be a ' nanotechnological laboratory ' capable of accelerating or retarding his brain activity. He came to believe that the implant was extraterrestrial in origin and the main motivation for his theories and ideas .................and interest in UFOs
Essentially two dimensional - no sense or need for perspective or any other artistic convention as they work to their own rules ..........and whilst in reproduction they look like magazine drawings , diagrams , the scale is misleading - they are not small.............
These are big canvases , " combining words and imagery to depict a spiritual architecture of explanation , tackling concepts like dimensionality , time travel through hacking relativity , connecting conceptual threads shared by philosophers through the millennia , and theories about the cosmic origins of mankind "......
Yesssss......................
Laffoley has evolved to viewing his work as an interactive , physically engaging psychotronic device , similar to architectural monuments such as Stonehenge or the Cathedral of Notre dame and their spiritual order .
My drive out to the day job the following day now seemed rather flat and pointless...............I just find his work fascinating..............
The Outsiders are out there , doing their own thing .........you just have to look for them.............
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