Visit From Overseas By Brian McCaffery and Kevin Bambra


The title to this piece may seem a bit odd as it is to do with an English Airbrush Artist that attended an Airbrush Show in Antwerp, Belgium. Great Britain is after all part of Europe but at the end of the day you can’t get away from the fact that you have to cross the water to get to Belgium all be it only a stretch of water that is 21 miles wide between Do- ver and Calais. Thankfully one such artist made the journey and considering that we don’t get many British Artists in this neck of the woods I for one am glad that Kevin Bambra made the trip and took some time out to talk to me during the first Airbrush Show in Antwerp. (May 2011)


Right then Kevin normally I would go through a question and answer session but to change things a little why don’t you tell us when, where, and how you got started and maybe I will jump in now and then just to clarify things. Well I don’t know how far you want me to go back, but art began for me around the age of ten. I started drawing and painting things that I saw around me. It’s actually quite amaz- ing what you can accomplish just with a simple water color set that was purchased form a children’s toy store. Things developed for me over the next six years art became my best subject in secondary school/ high school also dur- ing those six years I was also reading magazines like Custom Cars and Backstreet Heroes.


Q - Are those magazines what influenced you to become a custom painter. A - Well eventually they played a roll in my development as a custom painter. But you must understand I come from a working class environment and my parents had to work long and hard just to make ends meet they did however sup- port me in my artistic endeavors. At the age of 16 I left school and enrolled in Art College which was a big financial strain on my parents as the colleges here are not govern- ment funded. But even though I was happy to be there I always had sort of guilty feeling knowing that my parents were working their hardest to get the money together to keep me there. Then came a turning point for me as far as staying in college, there was one particular tutor who had quite a malicious way of handling things if they were not go- ing the way he wanted them to go. You must understand I am sitting in a class with an easel and board with an A2 sheet of paper plus pencils that have all been purchased by my mother. I was sketching and I had drawn a line wrong so I was erasing the line when the tutor saw this he was not happy as he was not a big fan of erasers, the way he shows his distaste is by taking your work and tearing it in half. To be honest my blood was boiling this was material that my mother had worked hard to pay for, well that was the end of art college for me.


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32