New photos on the drying table
new photos from the 27 February session
March 20, 2023
20March 2023
Jan. 31, 2023
Detail
A detail of a much larger photo
This is a detail of a much larger photograph. The lighting is a double event, like the taking of the photo with a Mamiya RZ67 is an event in itself. The whole production is a chain of events. Viewing a photo is an event in itself.
Jan. 31, 2023
Poetry of Force
A sculpture in development.
The preliminary version in clay of a new sculpture in development. Provisional title: The Poetry of Force - or - The Alchemy of Force.
Dec. 16, 2022
René Girard
Violence and the Sacred
This book has really caught my attention.
Oct. 22, 2022
Sailing to Byzantium
Sailing to Byzantium
I
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees,
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
II
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
III
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
IV
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
Oct. 22, 2022
Byzantium
By William Butler Yeats
Byzantium
The unpurged images of day recede;
The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed;
Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song
After great cathedral gong;
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.
Before me floats an image, man or shade,
Shade more than man, more image than a shade;
For Hades' bobbin bound in mummy-cloth
May unwind the winding path;
A mouth that has no moisture and no breath
Breathless mouths may summon;
I hail the superhuman;
I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.
Miracle, bird or golden handiwork,
More miracle than bird or handiwork,
Planted on the starlit golden bough,
Can like the cocks of Hades crow,
Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud
In glory of changeless metal
Common bird or petal
And all complexities of mire or blood.
At midnight on the Emperor's pavement flit
Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,
Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame,
Where blood-begotten spirits come
And all complexities of fury leave,
Dying into a dance,
An agony of trance,
An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.
Astraddle on the dolphin's mire and blood,
Spirit after spirit! The smithies break the flood,
The golden smithies of the Emperor!
Marbles of the dancing floor
Break bitter furies of complexity,
Those images that yet
Fresh images beget,
That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.
Sept. 23, 2022
Mae Clarke in Frankenstein, 1931
Frankenstein. James Whale. 1931
Sept. 19, 2022
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
Three Studies for a Crucifixion, 1962
Oil on canvas, three panels
198.1 x 144.8 cm, each panel
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 64.1700
© The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved
I saw this painting as a photo in a magazine, around 1965/
Sept. 12, 2022
Hans Baldung Grien and me
Encounters with supernatural figures
Hans Baldung Grien: Death and the Maiden. 1517
Sept. 4, 2022
Giovanni Bellini's Holy Allegory
My visit to the Galleria degli Uffizi, 3 September 2022
Aug. 18, 2022
New sculpture in development
A new sculpture in development in my studio.
My photographic activities have temporarily had to make way for this new work in development.
Aug. 12, 2022
2006 <> 2016
2 works
Bringing 2 works together
Aug. 5, 2022
Reindeer Werk with Jean Sellem
September 1975
Photo by Angela Spanswick. Reindeer Werk, Thom Puckey and Dirk Larsen, with gallery holder Jean Sellem in the middle. Galerie St. Petri, Lund, Sweden. September 1975.
Aug. 1, 2022
Paul Nougé
The Subversion of Images
1929-30. Taken with a simple box-camera.
July 30, 2022
Study in curves
Study in curves
July 28, 2022
Paul Nougé
From: Subversion des Images
First edited and published by Marcel Marien in 1968 in a limited edition of 230 copies, half a year after Paul Nougé’s death, The Subversion of Images is a miniature classic in both the photobook and surrealist canons. It collects Nougé’s notes and photographs from 1929–30 to form a guidebook to the surrealist image. Nougé here outlines his conception of the object and the surrealist approach to it, while also offering an accompaniment to the visual work of his colleague, René Magritte, whose paintings he sometimes titled. How might a tangle of string elicit terror? How might the suppression of an object move one to sentimentality? What is the effect of a pair of gloves on a loaf of sliced bread?
July 27, 2022
Robert Capa
Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death, Cerro Muriano, September 5, 1936
Capa's famous photo. Ref - my sculpture https://thompuckey.com/oeuvre/49/
July 27, 2022
Herbert James Draper
The Lament for Icarus, Herbert James Draper.
The Lament for Icarus - Herbert James Draper. 1898. Oil on canvas. 180 cm × 150 cm. Tate Britain, London.
July 26, 2022
Georges Seurat
Landscape, ca. 1881
Georges Seurat
French, 1859–1891
Landscape, ca. 1881
Black Conté crayon
The Art Institute of Chicago
July 26, 2022
Alix Cléo Roubaud
Alix Cléo Roubaud
July 26, 2022
La Grande Odalisque
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Grande Odalisque, also known as Une Odalisque or La Grande Odalisque: by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
July 26, 2022
The Poem that Took the Place of a Mountain
By Wallace Stevens 1954
There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.
He breathed its oxygen,
Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.
It reminded him how he had needed
A place to go to in his own direction,
How he had recomposed the pines,
Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds,
For the outlook that would be right,
Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:
The exact rock where his inexactnesses
Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged,
Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea,
Recognize his unique and solitary home.
July 26, 2022
Possession
Andrzej Żuławski
Possession - the 1981 psychological horror/drama film directed by Andrzej Żuławski
July 24, 2022
Piero della Francesco
Sansepolcro
Visit 19 July 2022
July 23, 2022
Bruges La Morte
Intro to blog
Fernand Khnopff's frontespiece for Georges Rodenbach's novel, Bruges La Morte, 1892
July 23, 2022
Eugène Atget
Eugène Atget, Parc Saint-Cloud. 1922
MoMA New York
July 16, 2022
L'Arrêt de Mort. Maurice Blanchot
the book of books
