Courtesy Martina Navratilova, tennis as art

PARIS: Who but world women's tennis legend Martina Navratilova would have believed hitting a ball could become art hung on a wall?

Yet for the past six years in secret, Navratilova and Slovak artist Juraj Kralik have been painting canvases produced by hitting balls, which are going on show on Thursday, fittingly at Roland-Garros, home of the French Open Grand Slam tournament.

"It was top secret, only three or four people knew, we didn't want anyone to steal the idea," Navratilova said ahead of the opening of their show, 'Art Grand Slam', which closes August 20.

Snatching time between tournaments and matches, the pair in 2000 began the project dreamt up by Kralik in Navratilova's Czech homeland town Revnice 'where I spent my first two years playing tennis,' when aged five to seven.

It was there that the 50-year-old tennis legend, who won 354 titles, first learnt how to hit balls soaked in paint onto a canvas plastered on a wall, or how to bounce them on a canvas laid out on the ground.

Over the next years, successively in New York, Australia, Paris and Wimbledon, they continued to create works inspired by the game, the lines of a tennis court and the impact of balls, 'mostly using forehand', she said.

"What I like about it is that here you hit the ball but don't know exactly what you're doing. It's the unknown, which is what you have in sports," she said.

Navratilova's favourite among the 60-odd works hung at the show is a large 4.6 x 2.5 metre (15 x 9 foot) canvas called 'Way of My Life' that features two loops formed with multicoloured tennis-ball impacts that spiral upwards to the top edge of the painting.

"It represents my career, with a small loop and a big loop and at the end it shows I'm finished," she said.

Navratilova, who had a breathtaking 31-year professional career, retired from competitive tennis between 1995 and 1999, but returned in 2000 and retired a second time last year.

"It's an introduction into the world of tennis. I hope tennis players will like it," she said of the show.

Kralik, who grew up in communist Czechoslovakia, says he was always fascinated by tennis and loved to watch clay courts being watered, swept and drawn with lines, and then watch the traces of balls and feet.

It was in 1999 at Flushing Meadow in New York that he decided to try to record as art the pitch of a ball.

"We will place the tennis art alongside the fine arts," he says in a book.

As for jean-clad Navratilova, what does she do nowadays with her spare time? 'Travel,' she said.

She hopes the tennis-art show will go to the United States and elsewhere after its debut in Paris, and is also involved with a book she has written, 'Shape Your Self', which she said "is more about being healthy than losing weight."

But much of her time too is spent promoting a 'Rainbow' credit card for gay and lesbian groups which, when used for purchases, raises money for a Rainbow Endowment fund set up 10 years ago.

It has so far handed out $2 million in grants to gay and lesbian groups.