I had the privilege of interviewing Laffoley in-depth over
the course of two weekends back in February of 2004. I watched him create his brilliant H.P. Lovecraft-inspired
painting “Pickman’s Mephitic Models” while firing esoteric questions at him in
his temporary studio at Cal State Fullerton.
This interview, entitled “Satan, God, H.P. Lovecraft and Other Mephitic Models: An Interview with Paul Laffoley,” was
published twice, first by Paranoia in
the winter of 2004 and then reprinted by a French magazine entitled Particules in the fall of 2009. The unexpurgated version of the interview
will be included in my forthcoming book, Imaginauts: Exploring the Outer Reaches of the Mind. Here’s a brief excerpt from that encounter:
RG: The painting you’re working on now is about Lovecraft?
PL: It's called
"Pickman's Mephitic Models,” based on the story
[“Pickman’s Model”]. Certain things about it many people don't
realize. [Richard Upton] Pickman was a
real painter who lived between 1888 and 1926.
Now, there's a question mark [gesturing toward the writing in the
margins of the painting], because Lovecraft claims that he turned into a ghoul. God knows how old he is now.
RG: Well, we know he reappears
in [Lovecraft’s novella] The Dream Quest
of Unknown Kadath as a ghoul. So,
let me get this straight, you’re saying Pickman really lived in Boston?
PL: Yeah. That's what I'm saying. In other words, the reason why I found out
about that is that I went to Brown University.
I belong to the Lovecraft Society, which meets at the University. They do things like follow in Lovecraft's
footsteps, just like he followed in Edgar Allan Poe's footsteps. I mean the actual footfalls, you know, like
they’re going out looking for Sasquatch, this kind of stuff. I mean, these are really dedicated people
when it comes to Lovecraft. But in the
top floor of the John Hay Library, you have all of Lovecraft's archives. And messing around in there, I noticed, I
said, what are these paintings? And the
librarian told me, “Well, those are Pickman’s paintings.” I said, “I thought this was like something he
made up, like The Necronomicon, that
kind of stuff.” And he said no, that the
guy actually existed. He was a mediocre
painter, living in Boston at that time, painting for the Boston Art Club, and
places like that. We’re not talking avant-garde
galleries here. But at a certain point,
Pickman got this studio in the north end of Boston, which at that time was the
first area where people lived when they first came to Boston. And the reason they did that, they were
defending their position, and in order to really defend it, by 1700 they had
dug underground tunnels all through that area so people could go up in a house
and then not be seen by the enemy attacking them.
RG: I remember that from the story.
PL: The tunnels were used
first in the Revolutionary War. The next
time they were used is during the time of moving slaves from the south on big ships,
and when they would land they'd instantly go down into those tunnels, until the
slave ships that were trying to catch them, coming up from Chesapeake Bay or
West Virginia, got tired and went away. And
Lovecraft’s story is about Thurber, the narrator, going down into these tunnels
with Eliot. Thurber starts hearing
rustlings and stuff down there. He's
looking at these God-awful paintings, very realistic renderings of demons, as
they’re going deeper and deeper into the inner sanctum. And then suddenly Eliot disappears and
Thurber grabs something that he thinks is a background shot of a photograph. When he gets home he realizes that this was
actually the demon that Pickman had taken a snapshot of, and that he was using
it to help him paint the thing from real life.
And so I've always wanted to do a painting on this […].
Now, the thing is, once I discover
that these paintings are actually in the John Hay Library, I ask them,
"Can I come back and take pictures of them?" The guy says, "Absolutely not. This is like a museum. The only thing you can do is, you or a sketch
artist can sketch these things; otherwise it’d be like going into a museum and borrowing
stuff. You can't do that. The things would be ruined, taking them out
of the case and all that kind of stuff.” So I said okay. I got a friend of mine and said, "Let's
go down and do some visualization of that stuff. That's how I got the things that’re there [referring
to a series of four sketches hanging on the wall of his upstairs studio]. Arnie Clapman—that’s my friend’s name—he
decided to do the first sketch. So I’d
say stuff like, "No, no, that's wrong, look at this here." So we were working these things out together
to get a pretty good rendition of what they actually look like. There's quite a number of paintings that Pickman
did. So I picked basically the four
juiciest ones. They're not really the
way they’re described in the story, because Lovecraft’s talking about something
that almost sounded like Andrew Wyeth or Norman Rockwell, you know, the dogs
playing poker and this kind of stuff. In
other words, that isn't what Pickman was all about. He was depicting the suffering of Satan, you
see, through these demons….
[End of excerpt]
When Paul Laffoley first told me about discovering Pickman’s
original paintings in the John Hay Library, my reaction was a skeptical one. After all, every Lovecraft fan knows that Pickman
was a fictional character. I figured
Laffoley was pulling my leg in an Andy Kaufman kind of way. Nonetheless, he seemed rather insistent about
it, and kept up the tale over the course of an entire week… which seemed like a
long way to go to pull a stranger’s leg.
Later, after Paul returned to Boston, I heard from Joan
d’Arc (the editor of Paranoia, who knew Laffoley very well and visited
his studio often) that he mentioned to her casually one afternoon, “That Robert
was a nice guy but, I dunno, he seemed to think I was lying about those Pickman
paintings.”
This intrigued me. If
he was making up the story, why be upset about me not believing him—particularly
when he didn’t even know I would ever hear his comment? I realized I was being like some of my more
“rational” acquaintances who don’t believe my stories about the crazy things
that happen to me in an average day despite the fact that such stories are, in
fact, 100% true.
I then endeavored to follow through on the tale. I called the John Hay Library in Providence
and asked to speak to the curator. After
some frustrating days of playing phone tag, I finally got a hold of the man. He sounded like an older, distinguished
gentleman with a British accent, exactly what you would expect a “curator” to
sound like—like the guy who first uncovers The Mummy in those old Universal
Monster pictures.
So I say to the guy, “Listen, I just have a quick question. Do you have any paintings in the Lovecraft
archive?”
“Of course.”
“You do?”
“Absolutely.”
“Wait a minute, you shittin’ me? Listen, I recently did an interview with Paul
Laffoley. He’s this painter from Boston, maybe you’ve
heard of him? Anyway, he recently
completed a painting based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft. It’s called ‘Pickman’s Mephitic Models.’ It’s based on this Lovecraft story ‘Pickman’s
Model,’ which is about a painter named Richard Upton Pickman who’s involved in
painting these ghouls in Boston ‘n weird crap like that, y’know? Know what I mean?”
“Yes, indeed, yes.”
“Y’see… Laffoley claims he based his painting on
paintings he actually saw in your archives.”
“Oh, of course, we do have the Pickman paintings.”
“C’mon… get outta here!
Really?”
“Well, perhaps I should be clear before we proceed. It’s not exactly a painting. It’s a sketch of Pickman’s painting.”
“HOLY--! BY PICKMAN
HIMSELF?”
“Excuse me?”
“This sketch! It’s by
Richard Upton Pickman?”
“No, no. It’s by
Lovecraft. It’s his interpretation of
what Pickman’s painting might have
looked like.”
“Yes, well… okay, I knew that’s what you meant… uh, are
there any other paintings or sketches in the archive?”
“Indeed! We have some
interpretations of Pickman’s paintings by the writer Robert Bloch.”
“Let me take a few steps back. See, Laffoley’s claim was that Lovecraft
based the Pickman painting on a real painter who actually lived and
worked in Boston. He said that these paintings, the ones by the real
Pickman, were stored in the archive and that he had seen them. Is that in any
way possible?”
“Well… there were many painters named Pickman living in the
Boston area at that time.”
“But have you ever heard that Lovecraft based the Pickman
character on one of them?”
“No, no. But then
again Lovecraft was always basing his characters and settings on those he
encountered in his daily life.”
“So you have no knowledge of any paintings stored in the
archive there in the library that could be, say, mistaken for a painting
painted by a real man named Richard Upton Pickman who might have lived in
Boston in the 1920s or the ‘30s?”
“No.”
“Okay. Well… that’s
it then. I don’t have any more questions. Thank you very much for your time.”
“No problem at all, sir, no problem at all.”
Laffoley, as you can see, was the 21st century physical
manifestation of the Trickster archetype in human form… but he was far more than
just that. The word “visionary” gets bandied about a lot
these days in relation to anyone who can produce a random squiggle on a blank canvas,
but Laffoley—as one can readily tell with only a cursory glance at his finest work—was
a man for whom the word “visionary” was by no means an exaggeration. Look at such paintings as “Alchemy: The Telenomic Process of the Universe,”
“Dimensionality: The Manifestation of
Fate,” “Thanaton III,” or “Pickman’s Mephitic Models.” He was a crazy shaman whose brain seemed to
be perpetually on fire, a true creative genius in an age sorely lacking in
unfettered minds.
You will be missed, Mr. Laffoley, you will be missed... but the numerous incendiary mysteries you
left behind on canvas will forever remain to confound and overwhelm our pitifully
mundane senses. Rest In Peace.
(Oh, as a bonus, here’s my final analysis of Laffoley’s
Pickman yarn: Ultimately, I concluded
that somebody in a position of power at Brown University caught wind of my
interest in Richard Upton Pickman’s work and stole Pickman’s paintings before I could get through to the curator. How these blackguards managed to wipe the
memory of the paintings from the old curator’s mind is a detail I haven’t quite
pinned down yet. But let’s face it,
those curators are real pushovers and easily intimidated. If you can’t run away from Boris Karloff
dressed up in 500 pounds of monster make-up, you’re just not that clever to
begin with. That’s my story—and perhaps
Laffoley’s too—and I’m sticking to it.)
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