Jonas Wood has been watching sports his whole life, and the habit has followed him into the studio. “I played tons of sports when I was a kid and I was obsessed with following them,” Wood said, speaking with me by Zoom from his Los Angeles studio. “I used to read the entire sports section in the *Boston Globe*, all the stats and everything.” When he got out of grad school, Wood wanted to practice portraiture, but was “kind of exhausted trying to find personal subjects—friends, family, myself.” So he started using sports cards and images of basketball and baseball players he grew up with. It was just a way to practice painting the figure. Tennis arrived more casually—almost by accident—while Wood was watching matches late at night in the studio. “I remember watching the Australian Open and taking pictures of the TV with my phone,” he told me, occasionally looking off camera to dip his brush in paint.…