TENNIS "STAR"

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 120, 23 May 1930, Page 8

TENNIS "STAR"

HELEN WILLS'S CAME

AMBITION AS PAINTER

(From "The Post's" Representative.) NEW YORK, Ist May. Helen Wills, in private life Mrs. Frederick S.'Moody, has o.ieially opened her 1930 season by practice matches here, and by an exhibition of her tennis drawings, which drew crowded houses and the warm praise of the critics. Even tho opening of an exhibition of drawings by the late John Singer Sargent several years ago at the Grand Central Art Gallery, did not attract a | greater crowd than gathered there to j meet, Miss Wills and see her 29 drawings of famous tennis players, includ- ■ ing herself. \ Miss Wills hopes to become a portrait painter. "I realise," she said, I "that it takes many years to become j a painter, but I love painting so much that it is a pleasure—no-i only work, ! but diversion. I have drawn since I was a child, and began to study art when I was seventeen." , Tho tennis star devotes her morn- [ ings to drawing and painting. She is a student of the California School of Fine Art in San Francisco. Practising with Henry Griffin in singles—she has opened the season with him for very many years past—Miss j Wills was observed to mako some changes in her play, making it more like a man's. Instead of playing her well-known forehand drive from the back line and hitting hard throughout, sho varies her play with the chor) stroke. By the use of side-spin on her i sorviee, she is enabled to get up to the net —a strategy she rarely employed before. Critics .are wondering whether the changes she tried out hero are. to become part of her game in the classic fixtures,' It is not generally known that Miss Wills gets no practice on. turf courts in California. With the exception of Vancouver, 8.C., there aro no turf courts in tho West —none further west than tho Gerinantown Cricket Club's courts at Philadelphia. She practices on clay and concrete courts, and always spends a month or so here iv tho east to accustom herself to the difference in pace and flight of tho ball from the ground.