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Paul Laffoley, The City Can Change Your Life, 1962

Paul Laffoley Cambridge, MA, 1935-2015

The City Can Change Your Life, 1962
Acrylic and vinyl lettering on canvas
24 x 48 in.
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Subject_ An Airplane Striking the Southern End of Manhattan. Symbol Evocation_ An Occasion of Pre-Perception of a Future Event. Comments_ As I think back over the 51 years since I...
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Subject_ An Airplane Striking the Southern End of Manhattan.
Symbol Evocation_ An Occasion of Pre-Perception of a Future Event.

Comments_
As I think back over the 51 years since I did this painting, I cannot actually reconstruct the moment in time when I was motivated to paint this, and with such prophetic specificity. Obviously, I believe the subject did obviously refer, in some future tense, to the terrorist attack by planes on New York’s “World Trade Center”_ (The Twin Towers) on September 11, 2001. That day is when Muslims state that Jesus was born. That date makes more sense to me than December 25th, [a date that was adjusted to Pagan winter solstice festivals in order to draw more people into the fold of forming Christianity]. September 11th in the Middle East would have been rather warm at the 31½ North Latitude in Bethlehem [Bayt Lahm], and a pregnant couple could have stayed in a barn very comfortably.
The visual structure of the painting consists of three separate panels. Your eyes move right to left with two lightning bolts aimed into the waters surrounding the island. Below the panels are displayed the Zodiac symbols to be read from right to left. Coming in from the right is a small propeller driven airplane painted violet which appears to grow larger in scale as it nears the island until it becomes monstrous in size in relation, until the plane lands with an audible thud.
The Symbolism begins its work from the right. At 3 minutes past 9_00 A.M. in the morning as the tension mounts, the plane moves toward the island. In the second panel the plane as it moves closer to the island and appears larger and larger, and the passengers feel heart broken about what is to happen to them. Soon the plane becomes huge in relation to the island as the plane dives straight down to the ground with a thud. The anxiety of time turns into the horror of heartbreak, and finally the finality of death.
I think what happened to me was a precognitive dream on the night before I headed for New York City was a was a precognitive dream brought on by extreme anxiety of being “grand juried” out of “the Harvard Graduate School of Design” for “conceptual deviance.”
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Provenance

Private Collection

Exhibitions

The Force Structure of the Mystical Experience. New York_ Kent Fine Art
September 11 – November 7, 2015 illus.

Literature

Walla, Douglas, Linda Dalywimple Henderson, Steve Moscowitz, and Ariel Saiber. The Essential Paul Laffoley. Chicago_ University of Chicago Press, 2015. illus in color plate 1
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