Airstream Artist Lambert Visits RV/MH Hall of Fame – RVBusiness – Breaking RV Industry News
ELKHART, Ind. – Canadian artist and musician Michael Frank Lambert of Airstream Studios was visiting Elkhart County over the holiday weekend as part of a Vintage Airstream Group trip and swung by the RV/MH Hall of Fame & Museum where a couple of Lambert’s pieces are on display.
Lambert has been painting and exhibiting for over 40 years and shared that he became overwhelmed with all the different conceptual art he was doing so he decided to just paint what he liked. So, he started with electric guitars—and realized it was really the reflective quality of the chrome parts that he liked.
So, about a dozen years ago he shifted his focus to painting Airstreams. “Often with a polished Airstream, when you get it in a camping setting it becomes like a mirror to all the foliage around it and becomes almost invisible, becoming one with its surroundings,” he said. “Almost like a ‘cloak of invisibility’.”
He said he found that challenging from a visual standpoint to be able to get that effect replicated in a painting.
He said he and his wife Tina got their first Vintage Airstream in 2005—a 1971 Airstream purchased from Can-Am RV Centre in Ontario where he now works part-time managing their social media—and said they didn’t know much about it, just launched into the restoration. But soon discovered a whole community of Vintage Airstream enthusiasts and they decorated their unit with décor appropriate to the time period.
“One of our first trips was to the RV Hall of Fame,” he said, adding, “My wife Tina and I have enjoyed many trips in our own Vintage Airstream and these trips have provided inspiration for many of my art works.”
The paintings Lambert does are either oil on canvas or oil on vintage salvaged aluminum—some from actual Airstreams. He’s restored several and salvages damaged panels to use as a canvas. Friends also provide some aluminum. Lambert said when he gets aluminum panels from an Airstream, he’ll write the year and model on the back.
“Then when the opportunity comes to paint on that aluminum, I’ll try to paint that trailer on the same aluminum—it’s a conceptual thing to think the same model of trailer in the image was once that piece of aluminum,” he said.
If he’s working on aluminum, he usually stamps the longitude and latitude of the setting right into the substrate.
“The concept that the surface of the painting has actually traveled thousands of adventurous miles somehow infuses the image with an unseen energy,” he said.
The paintings are also reproduced as prints on high quality paper and sometimes on sheet aluminum. The RV/MH Hall of Fame has two paintings on permanent display and sells prints in the gift shop. Lambert said the prints in the gift shop are what he calls “trailer size” so they can fit in an RV.
He’s painted a few other brands beside Airstreams and in the future, he plans to “expand the brands I paint, especially with attention to light and reflection—the shiny ones!”
“I hope that my original artworks and artist prints will bring my viewers and collectors many years of enjoyment, just like a classic vintage trailer.”
For more information visit his website at www.artstreamstudio.com
