Drawing for me was only a means to an end and becoming an artist has happened at the end – in my twilight years – yet, unlike my tennis career, more by accident than design.
I have always had a natural interest in art and wherever I have travelled in the world, I have wandered into galleries to admire the work of great artists.
In Spain, home to some of the most influential painters on the planet, I owned a women’s fashion boutique in Orange Square in Marbella and I used to take siesta time off to go and look at local exhibitions.
The first gallery I visited was Juan Miro’s contemporary art foundation on a hill outside Barcelona. He designed it within a maze of courtyards and terraces, to encourage young artists – and I guess older ones – to be experimental.
I also visited the Picasso Museum, given that Picasso was originally from Malaga, close to where I had a house. He was so prolific, any particular style is difficult to pin down, but I preferred his early pre-Cubist paintings like The Old Guitarist.
On home turf, I was lucky enough to befriend better-educated future entrepreneurs like Tony Bloom, Sol Kerzner and Mannie Simpkovitz, who were always collecting valuable modern international art so I was exposed to a wide variety of artists.
I often accompanied Sol to New York and while he was busy buying up hotels, I took an interest in buying art although, unlike him, I could only afford prints.
His second wife, Anneline Kriel, and I used to spend hours meandering in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the first exhibition we saw was of the great impressionists. Collectively, their bright colours and brush strokes made a deep impression on me, as did an American girlfriend I met there.
The Metropolitan is still my favourite gallery and it’s a beautiful walk through Central Park to get there.
I also spent a lot of time on the Left Bank, while playing at the French Open in Paris. The atmosphere was authentically bohemian and you got to interact with real artists instead of just admiring the work of long gone masters.
The Louvre and Musee D’Orsay are other must-sees, especially the latter as this is where all the great Impressionist paintings hang, Manet being my favourite and Van Gogh a close second because his paintings illustrated how he felt.
I can relate to that, but I stop short of cutting off an ear...
I encourage art enthusiasts to stroll along the avenues discovering the whimsical street art – more appealing than the anti-regime graffiti artists, whose stark work sprawls across every wall in Santiago and Buenos Aires.
It’s incredible how today’s trendy street artists make more money than any of the 20th century greats like Gauguin and Van Gogh, who basically starved because their genius was ahead of their time.
Banksy, the Bristol-born contemporary street artist and award-winning documentary director, is the best newcomer of the bunch and his gallery in Bristol is worth visiting.
He shot to fame when his 2013 mural Slave Labour (of a small boy sewing the British flag) was allegedly stolen from a wall in Wood Green, North London and removed to a top commercial gallery in Los Angeles that specialised in Andy Warhols.
I’ve never been a Warhol fan, I think he is overrated, unlike Cape Town-based Russian Tretchikoff, whose work I always admired even though he was initially considered kitsch. He has suddenly found new fame, which proves art is now about publicity.
On the tennis circuit, I found myself surrounded by art fanatics.
Ex Dutch No 1 Tom Okker owned the biggest gallery in Amsterdam, a city rivalling Paris with its wall-to-wall galleries lining the canals.
Another knowledgeable collector, Frew McMillan, whom I naively partnered on court, rather than in business, dealt only in the English landscape painter William Turner’s work. Frew introduced me to the Royal Academy of Art in Picadilly, London.
I like to use acrylics and my latest poster of Cape Town’s adventure spots, commissioned for Avis’s “Get Out More” campaign, is inspired by the colourists and naiivists of the Hautes Maritimes in France.
The citadel of St Paul De Vence, in the mountains above Nice, is another place I return to. It remains an artist’s colony and the famous Michelin-starred restaurant, La Colombe D’Or, still boasts an incredible collection of Picassos, Chagals and Monets on the walls around the pool.
The young artists couldn’t afford food and lodging, so they traded paintings and what a shrewd proprietor it must have been, who shook hands on that bargain.
Chagal, a good mate of Miro, lived here and is buried nearby and there is a fantastic Giro Foundation exhibiting both their art and sculptures – another art mecca.
As for eyecatching pieces of sculptures, some of the best steel pieces are standing tall in the fields of luxury hotels, such as the Chewton Glen and Great Fosters in England, rather than official galleries – a trend I salute and something local wine farmers are catching on to.
Art imitates life and life without food and wine and art would be as dull as tennis without Federer or Nadal.
Saturday Star
* Segal has done a series of posters of his favourite places. You can get your souvenir copy of Abe's Avis Adventure poster of Cape Town in the Saturday Star this week. And you can join him on a tour of his favourite haunts in and around Cape Town in an exclusive column in Saturday Star Travel. Don't miss it!