Victoria Azarenka won her first match since January at Wimbledon on Monday before revealing her recent injury spell on the sidelines had led to a love of art accidentally nurtured by wiping paint on her shirt.
The 24-year-old former world number one and double Australian Open champion missed three months of the season nursing a left foot injury.
But she wasn’t idle as she developed a liking for art with her imagination fired further by discussing the subject with Latvian player Ernests Gulbis.
“I’ll tell you a funny story. I don’t know what in the hell I was painting. I was like, Okay, I feel very emotional right now. I am just going to put on all the colours. I started doing it with my hands. I didn’t want to wash my hands, so I just did like that on my shirt,” she explained.
“Then I forget. It dried out. I put the shirt on. I walked outside because I was lazy. People were like, Wow, that’s such an amazing shirt, where did you get it?
“I was like, Really? They were like, It’s so cool.”
The Belarusian has now used her accidental art affair as a marketing tool.
“I actually had a meeting with Nike. I said, I can make many more like that if you want to. Come to my house, we’ll just do that and stuff.
“Then I had some friends over. I had a big canvas. I wanted to see what people want to bring to the painting, what they think about it. I gave each of my friends their space.
“I felt like it’s just emotions and the thoughts of people you care about in one thing and I can keep it in my house.”
Azarenka has also been getting tips from Gulbis, the wild man of the ATP Tour who has developed his own taste for fine art, in keeping with his status as the son of one of Latvia’s richest men.
“He’s very smart actually. He was telling me about the history of art a little bit, you know, the Impressionists,” she added.
Azarenka, who enjoys painting of the fashionable kind with her fingernails decked out in the colours of the Argentine World Cup team, was all business on Monday returning to the same Court One at Wimbledon where last year a serious knee injury ended her hopes.
Azarenka, the eighth seed, won 6-3, 7-5 against Croatia’s Mirjana Lucic-Baroni, who was a semi-finalist back in 1999.
It was on Court One in 2013 where she hurt her right knee in a nasty fall in the first round, an injury which sparked her withdrawal from the next round and leading her to angrily condemn the All England Club courts as dangerous.
This year, the former Australian Open champion has been plagued by a foot injury which kept her off tour from Indian Wells in March to Eastbourne last week where she lost her opener to Camila Giorgi.
“What was it like being off court? I think you feel like you have a lot of time off, but at the same time you got to do a lot of rehab if you want to get back to the court as soon as possible so it doesn’t feel like a lot of time off,” she said.
“Some days it was getting much better. Some days there was a little bit of a setback. That was the most difficult part.”
Azarenka now goes on to face Serbia’s Bojana Jovanovski.