Desmond Mason does not have to pursue his avocation.

With a multi-million dollar contract and a bright future with the Seattle SuperSonics, the 24-year-old rising star could simply ignore his college major, cast it aside as a meaningless experience that was there as a safety valve, in case his NBA career somehow did not come to fruition.

He could, like many of his teammates and colleagues around the league, spend his free time playing video games, watching movies, shooting pool, killing time until the next jump ball, the next arena full of bright lights and sycophantic adulation.

But art is not a hobby. Nor is it a chore. Art gets into your veins, flows through your body like lifeblood, omnipresent, pulsating, looking for a release, a way to express itself.

Art is not a part of you. It is, in many ways, who you are, what you are about. If you have the ability, the talent and the wherewithal to express yourself in artistic form, you don't simply shut that down because something more lucrative comes along. It's still there, inside you, waiting to get out.

Desmond Mason understands this. He understood it initially, when he began sketching during a 10th-grade ceramics class. He understood it when his college professor crumpled up a brown paper bag, threw it on the table and told Mason and his classmates to make a copy of it, the hardest thing, Mason says, he has ever done.

But he especially understood it when he and his fiancee, Andrea Larsen, traveled to Europe last summer, on a whirlwind, 10-day art tour. They visited the Louvre and saw the Mona Lisa in Paris, the Duomo in Florence, the Pantheon and the Coliseum in Rome.