Following his formal education in the classics at Brown and architectural studies at Harvard, Laffoley came to New York in 1963 to work with the visionary artist and architect Frederick Kiesler. As a painter, his work is usually classified as visionary art. Most of Laffoley's pieces are painted on large canvases and combine 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.