Jonas Wood debuts new tennis court paintings in Los Angeles

Jonas Wood has watched sports all his life, and the habit followed him into the studio. “When I was a kid, I played a lot of sports and I was obsessed with following them,” Wood said, speaking to me via Zoom from his Los Angeles studio. “I used to read the entire sports section of The Athletic boston globeall the stats and everything. ”

When he graduated from graduate school, Wood wanted to practice portraiture but was “a little exhausted trying to find personal subjects—friends, family, myself.” So he started using sports cards and images of the basketball and baseball players he grew up with. This is just one way to practice drawing people.

As Wood watched the game late at night in the studio, the tennis ball arrived more casually — almost by accident.

“I remember watching the Australian Open and taking pictures on the TV with my phone,” he told me, occasionally looking away from the camera and dipping his paintbrush in paint. “The lights were off in the studio and the court was just solid color with these lines running through it. I thought, this is a really interesting idea to paint. Everything I do is based on photographs, taking pictures, appropriating photographs, so I started collecting these images and testing them.”

In Wood’s paintings, the players disappear, the ball disappears, and all that remains is the court itself: bright colors, white lines and a net that cuts the image in half.

These stripped-down works form the basis of Wood’s new exhibition at Gagosian Beverly Hills, which collects court paintings based on events on the global tennis calendar (ATP, WTA and Olympics). Each canvas presents the court from the familiar broadcast vantage point behind the baseline, compressing the playing surface into a flat ribbon of color.

The idea for this new series of paintings had been brewing in Wood’s studio for several years.

“Actually, about eight or nine years ago, I wrote myself a note on the wall that said ‘All ATP tours stopped – a job?'” he said. “If I were to seriously revisit tennis painting, I’d want to really go through the entire tour and see all the differences on the court — the colors, the sponsors, the signage, all these little changes that I’d never explored before.”

About three years ago, he decided to stay the course. Wood subscribed to the Tennis Channel and began systematically filming tournament finals as they aired.

“I was watching the ATP and WTA finals, the Olympic finals, and taking screenshots in my studio,” he said. “In a way, it’s more about capturing the colors and shapes than actually watching the game. I’m building this archive of images and then making collages out of them.”

These collages became the starting point for the paintings in the exhibition. In some works, the courtroom appears to be surrounded by fragments of Wood’s studio—lights hanging from the ceiling, or handwritten notes pinned to the walls.

“A tennis court is basically three or four strips of color within a rectangle,” Wood said. “It’s very close to Albers or other geometric abstractions. So, for me, the way to study color became this way – balancing these saturated courts with black backgrounds or other images in my studio. Tennis is the medium, but the real question is how to make these colors work together.”

Wood says he is a tennis fan, though he is careful not to exaggerate the role tennis plays in his life. He mentioned long-time favorites like Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi, as well as more recent players like Novak Djokovic and Jannik Sinner.

One of the best photos in the show is based not on a professional match but on a Nintendo tennis game Wood played with his children.

“They didn’t look serious,” he said. “But they’re thoughtfully designed. I love that people can come to them for different reasons — because they like tennis, because they like color, because they’re interested in painting. It’s not necessarily the same thing.”

When our conversation ended, Wood was still tinkering. He slightly turned the still-in-progress canvas to show me his progress. It depicts fruit on a table, partially seen from the side, so that the edges of the plywood panels become part of the composition.

“Painting is a sport in a way,” he said.