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Hotel stationery: It’s often enough for a doodle or a phone number, but how about it doubles as art? When Michael McGregor began drawing on paper from The Ritz-Carlton in New York in 2016, it was the start of a series that went viral on Instagram. “I think drawings have become an antidote to the photorealism that bombards us every day,” McGregor tells me from his Los Angeles studio. The series is now collected in a book, Room Service (£29), published by Paragon Books.
McGregor, 40, travels in search of the “fleeting moment”: part of a group of traveling artists who have thrived on social media. Her work in Room Service colorfully juxtaposes the familiarity of a famous hotel’s watermark with small atmospheric vignettes: a hot dog at the Beverly Wilshire, two swans at the Taj Mahal Palace hotel or a pair of black loafers at the Hong Kong Hilton. It is the small cultural curiosities that capture your attention. “If I’m in London, I may have a stronger response to food in a corner shop than to anything in a museum,” McGregor says.
“His work evokes this feeling of leisure and relaxation, a warm breeze sitting on a patio in the afternoon sun, that first sip of something bubbly on vacation,” says gallerist Dasha Matsuura of Contemporary Hashimoto in Los Angeles, which held a showcase of McGregor’s work earlier this year.
Next month, her loose, colorful style will be the subject of another solo exhibition. Hotel drawings (from £1,500) and paintings (between £5,000 and £20,000) will be featured alongside new artworks, which he describes as “more intimate snapshots”. In fact I looked HTSIThe aesthete “I recently did a column looking for inspiration on how photographers capture details in interiors,” he laughs.