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UD’s friend, the painter Paul Laffoley, has died…

… and the New York Times (again with UD‘s help – she most recently provided the same writer, William Grimes, with information about the Polish painter Wojciech Fangor) has written a good obituary about this odd and complicated man who painted elaborate metaphysical, visionary works.

UD found him too odd for close friendship (her sister-in-law Joanna – who was also consulted by the obit writer – understood Paul with far greater depth and sympathy), but year after year, when they met at Soltan Christmas celebrations, UD would watch Paul with special interest, and with compassion. She was not interested in his impossibly convoluted and at the same time rather shallow and adolescent (he never got over the science fiction of his youth) theories of consciousness and the universe. She was interested in the man himself, his pale face and bald head and strangely serene demeanor out of place in the hectic business of gift opening in front of a fire. He stayed chilly amid that warmth, a wanderer above the mists down from altitude for a day, his pale face and labored breaths (in his later years heart failure made it hard for him to breathe) somehow conveying his inability to adapt to temperate climates.

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Or not a wanderer above the mists — a Rocket Man above the mysteries, an icon, for UD, of the terrible human desire to know everything. Aliens, Paul believed, had implanted something in his brain that made him a conduit of cosmic truths, and his artwork was the materialization of those truths. There was no irony that I could see, no humor or teasing evasion or bet hedging here. Either his flatly literal messages from beyond beguiled you with their astonishing plausibility or they made you draw back somewhat from the man and the canvases, unsettled by their Bartleby-like remoteness from the human realm.

The human realm, after all, is where – far from knowing everything – we know shit, and where the vocation of the artist, usually, is to reconcile us to knowing shit by aestheticizing both our cloud of unknowing and the suffering and beauty it generates. For UD, people like Paul represent a refusal of the human condition.

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Paul, Christmas in Cambridge.

pauljerzy 001

Jerzy Soltan in the background.

Margaret Soltan, November 21, 2015 2:00AM
Posted in: snapshots from home

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3 Responses to “UD’s friend, the painter Paul Laffoley, has died…”

  1. Jack/OH Says:

    There’s a local physician and patron of art whose office walls include paintings done in the manner of 1930s science fiction magazine covers. Young guys reaching for the stars, romance of distant worlds, etc.

  2. dmf Says:

    ah yeah the grand-systematizers

  3. MattF Says:

    William Grimes is one of the very best writers at the NYT. He was their restaurant critic, but then moved on. Here’s a sample, parts one and two of the tale of the chicken:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/21/dining/it-came-it-clucked-it-conquered.html

    http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/04/dining/lost-one-black-chicken-owners-bereft.html?pagewanted=all

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