David Campbell (1952–1984) decided to become an artist while a student at Erina High on the New South Wales Central Coast. Moving to Sydney, he studied from 1973 to 1977 at the Alexander Mackie College of Advanced Education. Over the following years, he lived and painted in the loft of a building on the corner of Pitt and Market streets in Sydney (now a McDonalds franchise). His sister, Elizabeth Campbell, recalls that painting and playing his flute were all he wanted to do, although he worked as a cleaner, a tennis coach, a professional surfer, an assistant in an aged care facility and a waiter at Tattersalls. He only ever painted three portraits. With his first, of poet and performer Adrian Rawlins, he became the youngest artist ever to have a work hung in the Archibald Prize (1977); his portrait of journalist Caroline Jones was a finalist in 1979, and artist Fay Bottrell in 1981. Orange Civic Theatre Gallery director Jane Raffin organised a one-man show of his work in the late 1970s, and in August 1979, on the initiative of Collin Clarke, Myer's chief display artist, 22 Myer windows fronting two Sydney streets were filled with mannequins posed among Campbell's watercolour paintings. In 1984, while living and painting in the Southern Highlands of NSW, Campbell was killed as he rode his motorbike back to Sydney to work.
