Purple triptych

The cross was a kind of self-portrait for Allen Maddox, a signature mark that apparently he arrived at in the mid-1970s by cancelling out a failed painting. Something positive emerged from this act of negation, and it would sustain Maddox’s work over twenty-five years. Born in Liverpool, he came to New Zealand as a child and studied briefly at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts, dropping out to pursue a career in advertising. Fortunately he abandoned this to return to painting, finding fellowship with Tony Fomison and Philip Clairmont. For a time the three banded together as members of the Militant Artists Union, living hard and painting harder.

‘Painting was “dancing” for him,’ a friend recalled of Maddox. ‘[I]t was a kind of calculated spontaneity…’¹ Looking at the looping, curvilinear forms of Purple triptych, it is easy to imagine this metaphor played out. Maddox sets down the basic rhythm of the dance with the painting's initial grid of crosses, working quickly with a thick brush and thin paint. He elaborates this with fancy footwork, applying dense, dark-purple oil and a rich liquid cream over those initial marks, in places letting them meld together into a lovely lilac. There are the flourishes, as he introduces highlights of blue and yellow, and there are the missteps, too – the leaching of oil into the thin, loose canvas, or the spatters of orange in the third panel, residue from what may have been another painting he was working on in the studio at the time.

Thinking of Purple triptych in these terms, it is difficult to marry the work with the image of the artist. ‘There is something about his work that brings people out in rashes,’ wrote critic Tony Green in 1978. ‘They talk about aggression, violence, adolescent attitudes. And Allen helps them along by adroitly acting the wildman’.² It is exactly that paradox, however, that makes his work all the more remarkable. Beset by psychological difficulties for much of his life, it was in his paintings that Maddox could truly dance.

William McAloon

This essay appears in Art at Te Papa, (Te Papa Press, 2009)

1. An unnamed friend, quoted in Alice Hutchison, ‘Allen Maddox: Systems of disorder (scratching the surface of the X-files)’, Log Illustrated, no. 15, Summer 2002, p. 37.
2. Tony Green, 'Allen Maddox in Auckland', Art New Zealand, no. 12, Winter 1979, p. 22.