Auto Art - Jim Leggatt

Auto Art

Born and raised across the river facing Montreal, it is no wonder Jim Leggett has a long list of jobs, passions and creative influences. The Gilles Villeneuve racetrack sits literally on an island at the foot of his hometown street and he has covered every type of motorsports from karting to NASCAR, IndyCar, IMSA and F1.

Leggett could never be accused of following a straight line in schooling, career path or his countless road trips. After a brief stint in a Graphic Design program at art college after high school, he was advised to try working in the field, learning on the job, rather than the more structured curriculum of formal education.

Landing a job in a small promotions company he was a one man art department in 1979.

“I knew just about nothing and had to learn very quickly on actual jobs from the other trades such as photographers, typesetters and printers,” laughs Leggett. “It was like being an apprentice in the old days. You learned your trade from each craftsman.”

After a few years of working in studios and agencies, Leggett’s independent streak led him to quit working for a regular pay cheque and go freelance for the next thirty years. This led to an ever more diverse range of work including retail store layouts, display design, trade show booths, electrical household products, packaging design. Each of these required more learning of various manufacturing methods.

A big change came when he was asked to provide racing photography for a large publisher in Toronto, Ontario. That soon led to writing race reports and then car reviews for major Canadian newspapers and specialty magazines which he supplied with his own photography instead of the stock shots from the manufacturers.

Story and PhotograPhy | Jim Leggett

“Whenever someone asked me to do something I had no experience with, I would never say no, I can’t do that,” said Leggett. “I would just nod and then figure out how to get it done.”

The automotive writing and photography took over much of his time and once again he chose to take the less direct path by buying a 1950 Chevy and driving it twice across the continent in search of stories and images from the road. Those two road trips have had a huge influence on his life.

“I bought Alice, a ’50 Chevy, and drove her across the US… twice,” laughed 59-year old. “The car was bone stock, unrestored. I wanted to see if we could make it to Los Angeles and back… and survive to tell the tale.

The convoluted route of which almost no planning was done beforehand, we covered over seven thousand miles in seven weeks in 2013 and almost the same distance in 2014.

“It was on these two trips that I became infatuated with land speed racing on the salt flats of Bonneville,” recalled Leggett. “As a racing journalist, it is a source of the purest motorsport stories. Man and machine against the clock, pure speed on the salt. You run what you build, there are no corporate teams, no prize money and only one trophy.”

“As a visual artist and photographer, it is like no other place I have seen. The light is pure magic to the eye.”