Murray, Cameron Norrie and Jack Draper’s coach James Trotman among those with a keen interest in abstract paintings
: Shutterstock/David Parry
What do Britain’s leading tennis players chat about while they’re waiting for their turn on court? The answer might surprise you, because it’s not usually forehands and backhands.
All kinds of tangential things come up, from the recent movie Challengers to the pace of the greens at Wentworth. But there is one clique with a very particular interest.
If you ever walked into the player lounge and saw Andy Murray and Cameron Norrie huddled together with Norrie’s sometime-coach James Trotman, it’s a safe bet that they were discussing something highbrow – like the brushwork in Maggi Hambling’s latest semi-abstract canvas.
Yes, a fine-art appreciation society has developed behind the walls of the Lawn Tennis Association’s Roehampton headquarters. The core membership comprises Trotman – who now concentrates on coaching new British No1 Jack Draper – as well as Murray and Norrie, with Murray’s former coach Jamie Delgado and Davis Cup captain Leon Smith loitering on the fringes.
Draper himself is not convinced, though. “I don’t know what they all see in it,” the 22-year-old told me in November. “Whenever I look over Trots’s shoulder, he’s staring at something that looks like it’s been made by a six-year-old, splashing paint around at random.”
Professional athletes tend not to be seen as the most cultured group of people. But these half-dozen enthusiasts break the mould… and then rearrange it into an intriguing sculpture.
To judge for yourself, dial up Trotman’s Instagram page. The images are almost always abstract paintings, and he captions them assiduously. One post, from June 8, is labelled “Paule Vezelay, Eight Curved Forms and Two Circles, Oil on Canvas, 1946.”
A post shared by James Trotman (@jamesotman)
Norrie’s tastes also tend towards abstraction. Speaking to reporters in January, he identified both Hambling – the Suffolk-based painter and sculptor mentioned above – and Damien Hirst as his favourite artists.
“Probably my most collected artist is Damien Hirst,” Norrie explained. “I’ve got some originals and some prints. But I do like Hambling as well. Andy and I have talked about her a few times and yeah, I don’t really know too much about it, but I’m still learning and it’s something interesting.
“I started collecting a couple years ago,” Norrie added, “and I always asked Trots Trotman his opinion on a few things. He’s pretty good at it and he’s got a really good eye. My girlfriend Louise also went to art school and she’s really into it.
“I always enjoy going to a few museums as well here and there. So, yeah, it’s quite addicting.”
Asked whether his interest is primarily for pleasure or investment purposes, Norrie replied: “A bit of both. First of all, you have to enjoy what you’re buying. But I need to leave a little bit of space for my girlfriend to make some art and put some on the walls.”
With his interest in provocative contemporary artists, Norrie clearly stands among Trotman’s cultural disciples. “We had a day off in New York recently, and me and Cam went to the Met Museum,” Trotman explained. “It’s something different.
“He’s got his own taste and his own eye,” Trotman added. “It’s a luxury, obviously, but if you can live around things that you really appreciate and enjoy, it’s nice.
“Cam said he was in New Zealand recently and there was an artist’s open house and he went and had a look and saw a piece that he really liked and he bought it. I asked him actually to send it through because we Trotman and Draper just practised with him now.”
A post shared by James Trotman (@jamesotman)
Murray’s curiosity was piqued in a different way. Five or six years ago, he was introduced to Hambling by a mutual friend who knew about her deep passion for tennis. The connections in this story work both ways, because Hambling once participated in a charity exhibition match at the Royal Albert Hall. According to a profile published by The Economist in 2020, “she returned a serve from Pat Cash with a fag clamped between her lips”.
In that same profile, Hambling explained: “He’s very funny, very intelligent and very genuinely shy. He came up to the studio, and for about an hour and a half he was asking me all these questions that really made me think.”
The unlikely relationship between Hambling – a chain smoker whose preferred tipples are whiskey or Special Brew – and the famously ascetic Murray led to a commission from the National Portrait Gallery. In 2019, Murray sat for her. Or, rather, he performed serves and groundstrokes in her studio while wearing his Wimbledon whites.
The two parties remember the experience very differently. For Murray, “it was difficult, it was a physical morning… I was there for three to four hours at least.” For Hambling, “it was actually a very short time. He says 10 minutes, I say less.” She also told The Economist that he was a terrible subject: “his whole thing is about movement, and I was asking him to stay still”. But the result is delightful, creating a sense of motion that a photograph could never match.
: AELTC/Thomas Lovelock
It’s typical of Murray that he is constantly asking questions. Hambling doesn’t find this easy to deal with, explaining that “it’s fatal when I think”. But then Murray is one of those people who likes to take things apart and look at them from every angle, as if the world were a giant Rubik’s Cube.
Perhaps his close interest in the art world shouldn’t surprise us. He lives with an artist, after all: wife Kim, who paints portraits of pets. He once even experimented with creating his own work – although it didn’t go terribly well.
“It’s like most things really,” he told The Guardian’s arts correspondent at the unveiling of the Hambling portrait. “You think, ‘I could do that’ or ‘that’s not difficult’. My wife was out that night, I was by myself in the house. She came back from dinner and was like, ‘What the hell have you done?’ I ended up with paint on the ceiling and all over the floor. It was horrific.”
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