Vintage Speedway Heroes

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Legtrailer Art : Through the medium of his painting he wishes to take us back to a time when the crowds were huge, the dirt was deep and speedway riders used a style known as legtrailing.


Tom Farndon was a Speedway rider who won the Star Riders' Championship in 1933 whilst with the Crystal Palace Glaziers.
He started his career with Coventry, initially at the Lythalls Lane track and later with the club based at Brandon Stadium, before a spell with the Crystal Palace Glaziers. He moved to New Cross Rangers with Palace promoter Fred Mockford in 1934. Farndon was the British Individual Match Race Champion and was undefeated from 1934 until his death in 1935.


Sprouts Elder was one of speedway's pioneers and featured in the first Star Riders' Championship, the forerunner to the Speedway World Championship in 1929.He was beaten in the semi final of the 'overseas' section by Vic Huxley. He also rode for the West Ham Hammers. In 1931 he rode for the Southampton Saints.
Elder was also a pioneer of speedway racing in the USA. He was a champion rider at home and abroad during the 1920s and early 1930s. Elder helped organize speedway racing on the east and west coasts of America and later became an AMA referee and a member of the competition committee.
Elder learned to race racing on some of the last surviving board track racing circuits during the 1920s. In the late 1920s Elder really began to make a name for himself by racing overseas.


George Newton is a former international speedway rider who featured in the first Speedway World Championship in final in 1936.
Newton started his career with the Crystal Palace Glaziers in 1932 and stayed with the promotion when they moved to New Cross in 1934. He made his England debut in 1936 and qualified for the World final, his first of three. At the end of the 1938 season Newton retired due to illness, but not before helping New Cross to the National League championship.


Arther George "Bluey" Wilkinson was an international speedway rider.
He rode in the UK for the West Ham Hammers from 1929 to 1939. 1935 saw Bluey win the Australian Championship, winning it again in 1938, both the three lap and four lap titles. He also finished third in the Star Riders' Championship, the forerunner to the Speedway World Championship in 1933.
In 1937 He won the League Championship with the Hammers and won the ACU Cup the following year. However the pinnacle of his career was becoming World Champion in 1938 after finishing third in the inaugural competition in 1936.

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Jasper Johns

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Jasper Johns, Jr. (born May 15, 1930 in Augusta, Georgia) is an American contemporary artist who works primarily in painting and printmaking. He is represented by the Matthew Marks Gallery.
He is best known for his painting Flag (1954-55), which he painted after having a dream of the American flag. His work is often described as a Neo-Dadaist, as opposed to pop art, even though his subject matter often includes images and objects from popular culture. Still, many compilations on pop art include Jasper Johns as a pop artist because of his artistic use of classical iconography.



Early works were composed using simple schema such as flags, maps, targets, letters and numbers. Johns' treatment of the surface is often lush and painterly; he is famous for incorporating such media as encaustic (wax-based paint), and plaster relief in his paintings. Johns played with and presented opposites, contradictions, paradoxes, and ironies, much like Marcel Duchamp (who was associated with the Dada movement). Johns also produces intaglio prints, sculptures and lithographs with similar motifs.



Johns' breakthrough move, which was to inform much later work by others, was to appropriate popular iconography for painting, thus allowing a set of familiar associations to answer the need for subject. Though the Abstract Expressionists disdained subject matter, it could be argued that in the end, they had simply changed subjects. Johns neutralized the subject, so that something like a pure painted surface could declare itself. For twenty years after Johns painted Flag, the surface could suffice - for example, in Andy Warhol's silkscreens, or in Robert Irwin's illuminated ambient works.



Abstract Expressionist figures like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning ascribed to the concept of a macho "artist hero", and their paintings are indexical in that they stand effectively as a signature on canvas. In contrast, Neo-Dadaists like Johns and Rauschenberg seemed preoccupied with a lessening of the reliance of their art on indexical qualities, seeking instead to create meaning solely through the use of conventional symbols. Some have interpreted this as a rejection of the hallowed individualism of the Abstract Expressionists. Their works also imply symbols existing outside of any referential context. Johns' Flag, for instance, is primarily a visual object, divorced from its symbolic connotations and reduced to something in-itself.



In 1998, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York bought Johns' White Flag. While the Met would not disclose how much was paid, "experts estimate [the painting's] value at more than $20 million." In 2006, private collectors Anne and Kenneth Griffin (founder of the Chicago-based hedge fund Citadel Investment Group) bought Johns' False Start for $80 million, making it the most expensive painting by a living artist.



The National Gallery of Art acquired about 1,700 of Johns' proofs in 2007. This made the Gallery home to the largest number of Johns' works held by a single institution. The exhibition showed works from many points in Johns' career, including recent proofs of his prints.

In spring 2008, a ten-year retrospective of Johns' drawings was mounted at New York City's Matthew Marks Gallery.