About The Artist

For AC, art is a trip through altered states of the bizarre and the grotesque – yet he describes his work as realistic; 'art’is radar’ he says. Influenced by the dark-side of Romanticism, Aestheticism and Decadence, AC may endorse the iconoclasm of Dada, the 'absolute non-conformism' of Surrealism, the Angst of Existentialism, and the immediacy of Pop. But they are only points of departure, none is a destination – we live in a world of tabloid impressionism, open realism and amplified hyper-culture; such is the heroism of our quasi-postmodern life, our Subtopian Materialism. Born in 1949 near Hampton Court, in what was then the Urban District of Twickenham, (Middlesex), A C lived in South London until 1963 when he moved to Essex and co-founded the Neo-Surrealist Convulsionist Group in 1966.. He moved back to London in 1973. His drawings, collages, reviews, essays, translations, poetry and stories have appeared in numerous small press magazines in the UK and abroad, and he is or was a regular contributor to Nox, Stride, Monomyth, The Supplement, Midnight Street, Inclement, Neon Highway, International Times and many other publications. The poem sequence Space Opera was made into a digital video (by Michelle Martin/OS2) and shown at the onedotzero3 Festival, at the ICA, London, in May 1999. The film of Space Opera has been used for several years as part of the lecture/seminar on fragmentation as part of the Craft of Writing module, a first year core unit at University College Falmouth. ac-cygnusx.blogspot.co.uk/