I’ve watched the same movie every day for 235 days in a row, but I’ve never viewed The Day the Earth Stood Still 873 times like the recently deceased artist Paul Laffoley did. I’m not suggesting monomania is the only key ingredient in creating something fascinating–it’s certainly not–but constancy sure does help. Laffoley was one of the more determined and otherworldly visionaries, a maker of works that seemed hatched from the mind of an occultist in outer space. 

The opening of his well-written New York Times obit penned by William Grimes:

Paul Laffoley, whose annotated diagrammatic paintings, with their kaleidoscopic representations of abstruse philosophic systems, made him one of the most distinctive and cerebral of the outsider artists, died on Nov. 16 at his home in Boston. He was 80.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said Douglas Walla, his dealer at Kent Fine Art in Manhattan.

Mr. Laffoley (pronounced LAH-fuh-lee), an architect by training, translated his ideas about time travel, other dimensions, astrology and alien life-forms onto square canvases that he illustrated, in brilliant colors, with precisely rendered spirals, pinwheels, eyes and architectural forms, annotated around the borders with text in vinyl press-on letters.

Many of the works incorporate mandalas. Others look like floor plans for the future, or cosmic board games. Their texts often pay homage to the thinkers behind the work, their names simply strung together in a row. The Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin recurs frequently, along with Goethe, Blake and Jung.

Mr. Laffoley drew from myriad sources. He claimed that he had seen the film The Day the Earth Stood Still 873 times.•