An Artist Watches Wimbledon

Painting by Brooke Stewart: "Wimbledon community court," grass Oil, acrylic, plastic and paint additives on wood panel with sewing 36 x 78 x 2 in (91.44 x 198.12 x 5.08 cm)

Painting by Honor Titus, "Prosperity," 2023.

My favorite part of the tennis world right now is one of its top players, Carlos Alcaraz. I like to watch him play because he runs for anything. As an artist, I understand this because in art or in sport you don’t know what will work, what is too crazy to make happen, until you try it. To question something before you make it may keep you from making it at all. 

His joy for the sport is the other reason. He’ll smile if he hits a good shot, but he’ll also smile after a blockbuster rally that his opponent ultimately wins. It’s a love of the game to acknowledge a shot afterwards, even if it didn’t go his way, but it’s also a sort of creativity to me, or at least a deep awareness of it. 

Painting by George Bellows, "Tennis Tournament," 1920.

Alcaraz lost Wimbledon earlier this month, but the loser and the underdog are stories an artist knows well—because as society’s underdogs, we are expected to have day jobs or perpetual side gigs or to starve. But we do keep playing. An athlete—especially a professional male athlete—is not like us. Society since ancient Greece has revered their skill, their drama, the ability and form of their bodies, and artists are no exception in that worship. But I choose to take heart from the loss; there is disappointment, but to lose a game is not to lose the sport. It is to have another angle to examine your relation to it. To be lost from what you thought was working, in sport or in art, means that when you find the thread again of creating, working, playing that path is twice affirmed. You’ve been swayed, but you make the return.