Campbell was born in the Burnside district of Rutherglen, attended the town's Academy[1] and worked as an engineer at Clydebridge Steelworks before studying at Glasgow School of Art as a mature student, from 1978 to 1982.
[3] This move resulted in many of his early exhibitions taking place in New York, including his first solo show, in 1983, at the Barbara Toll Gallery.
[9] Campbell returned to live in Glasgow in 1986, and that same year his painting The Dangerous Early and Late Life of Lytton Strachey was acquired by The Tate.
[19] His subject matter has been described as focusing on the surreal ridiculousness of the English gentleman, with almost Bertie Wooster type scenarios shown in his paintings.
Certainly a number of his paintings show slightly old fashioned looking men dressed in tweed suits, as in The Dangerous Early and Late Life of Lytton Strachey in the Tate.
[10] As this suggests, there is a strong literary element in the paintings, and in common with many other artists who were showcased by Alexander Moffat in his exhibition New Image Glasgow at the Third Eye Centre, Glasgow, in 1985,[6] one of the sources for this narrative bent in Campbell's work is the Neue Sachlichkeit artists of 1920s Germany.
Certainly this linear, or as the art critic Tim Hilton called it 'illustrational',[22] quality is evident in a painting like Campbell's Battle of Myths!