The letters and postcards excerpted below1 (edited to about half the total length of the originals) were written between 1978 and 1985 by the Liverpool-born New Zealand artist Allen Maddox (1948–2000) to his fellow-artist, friend and near contemporary Tony Lane (born 1949), during what is generally recognised as the strongest period of Maddox's creative life—the late 1970s and early 1980s. After art school (Maddox was at Ilam in Christchurch, Lane at Elam in Auckland) both gravitated to Wellington in the early 1970s where they exhibited together on several occasions, including 3 Wellington Painters at Peter McLeavey Gallery in 1975.2 Maddox had solo shows at Elva Bett Gallery in 1973–75, at Peter McLeavey Gallery in 1977–78, 1983 and 1985, and at various Auckland galleries, including Peter Webb Galleries, Barry Lett Galleries and (most frequently) Denis Cohn Gallery, from 1976. When Maddox moved to Auckland around 1978, then to London a year or two later, and again when he returned to Napier in the mid-1980s, he and Lane kept in touch by letters, postcards, exchange of paintings and visits.
It was late in 1975 that Maddox hit upon the X-grid motif with which he has become closely identified.3 It proved to be a fertile discovery, adaptable and protean in its formal, gestural and expressive effects and significations—a kind of visual syntax or grammar that was generative of seemingly infinite applications.4
Maddox's lively correspondence with Lane is especially valuable in both confirming and considerably modifying his popular reputation, especially in Auckland, as a hell-raiser and bad boy, closely associated with Philip Clairmont (1949–1984) and Tony Fomison (1939–1990) as the self-styled Militant Artists Union, and inclined to get up the noses of polite and respectable art lovers. Time, early death and sheer talent have enabled Clairmont and Fomison largely to transcend the excesses of their personal reputations, but
