The past decade has seen a shift in art’s center/periphery model, as so-called “Outsider Art” gains both curatorial and market visibility. Yet far from losing its particularity, as David Maclagan notes in a 2012 frieze roundtable, Outsider Art risks becoming “a prospective concept, continually enlarging itself, not least because of the commercial pressures driving it.” The term, in other words, may remain an expedient, ignoring the wildly different interests and circumstances of the artists in question. One of the roundtable discussants was Paul Laffoley, a Boston-based artist who sometimes falls into this category, though prefers to describe his relationship to the art world as that of a “lightly touching tangent.” While Laffoley has a few of the stereotypical qualities of the Outsider—an intensely private studio practice, a spiritualized singular vision—his commitments to theology and philosophy are too vast and scholarly for easy categorization. This partly owes to his upbringing. Laffoley’s father, a lawyer, cultivated an interest in occultism and Eastern faith practices (supposedly performing as a medium). When diagnosed with mild Asperger’s Syndrome, the artist found himself in the tutelage of an Indian Brahmin who taught math at Harvard. That said, Laffoley’s creativity might also derive from a more unusual muse: a …