In 2016, Michael McGregor was in his early 30s, living in Mexico City and hanging out with a group of local architects and musicians, when he began to paint.
Inspired by the city’s vibrancy, the budding artist — an expat from Brooklyn, where he’d spent a decade making a living as a writer and D.J. — began to depict birds, flowers and other everyday objects in colorful still lifes that helped him hone his artistic style.
At the same time, he started making sojourns to far-flung locales, using Mexico City as his base. “I had set an Airfarewatchdog tracker for flights to Tokyo for under 500 bucks round trip,” Mr. McGregor, 40, recalled last month during an interview at his studio in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. “I went to Japan for a month. I went to Korea for a month. I was traveling all over Mexico, to L.A., to New York.”
In the midst of all this, Mr. McGregor’s sister stayed at a Ritz-Carlton (“Maybe somewhere in the Caribbean?” he said) and gave him some of the hotel’s stationery, printed with its lion’s head and crown logo. “I made a bunch of drawings and posted them on Instagram,” he said. “People were super into them.”
Those initial pastel sketches spawned a series of colored pencil drawings on stationery from some of the most celebrated hotels around the world, including Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, Le Meurice in Paris, the Connaught in London and the Taj Mahal Palace in Mumbai. Drawn in hotel rooms, cafes, bars and airports, and aboard planes, buses and ferries, the playful scenes capture moments and objects from life on the road.
In February, Paragon Books and the San Francisco gallery Hashimoto Contemporary jointly published “Room Service,” a monograph featuring 118 of Mr. McGregor’s hotel stationery drawings ($35).
During the interview, Mr. McGregor, who also rents an apartment in Athens, gestured to a new series of oil paintings he was working on. They are intended to hang in a show tentatively titled “Travel & Leisure,” scheduled to open June 1 at Hashimoto’s New York gallery.
Featuring a hodgepodge of objects, including tennis balls, sunglasses, foreign currency and boarding passes, the paintings emerged from the hotel series, Mr. McGregor said. “These are sort of the back from travel, dumping out the suitcase type of thing.”
The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
What was it about the hotel stationery that appealed to you?
The first thing I noticed was the power of the typeface and how it immediately situates you. It gives a lot of context for your imagination to wander.
Oftentimes there is an allure or an essence in hotel stationery, like a lot of the Hawaiian ones are floral or they have a wave. In Vegas, they’re almost all gambling oriented. The really nice hotels have some sort of gold embossed lettering.
And it says a lot about the place. The second that you start to put images or words on it, it can completely shift. Or they can juxtapose with each other.
Was the stationery difficult to acquire?
Early on, I was very gun shy with stationery because I wasn’t sure where I was going to get it. Unless you have a huge archive like I do now, you’re like, “I’ve got 20 sheets of Chateau. I don’t want to mess them up.” But that’s crippling. Then you don’t do them or you do them and you’re trying too hard and it’s not good.
A friend of mine was working for the fashion brand the Row. He was at the Carlyle hotel in New York, and he was like, “If I got some envelopes and stationery from the Carlyle, would you do a commission for the people on my team?” And I said, “For sure.”
He had a mutual friend of ours bring them down to Mexico City and meet me at a bar — because it’s impossible to get mail in Mexico City. This was 2017. That might have been the first work I ever sold.
After that Row thing, friends of mine were traveling and getting richer while I was very broke. They would be at a hotel and be like, “Got you something.” And I’d say, “Send me a pad and I’ll send you a drawing back.” I collected tons like that.
Have you ever stayed at any of the hotels in the series?
Mostly no. I travel by myself, and I generally travel pretty no frills and with not a lot of stuff. I backpacked through Asia and all over America. I’ve probably driven across the country 10 times. Part of the reason I have the place in Athens is because I’m too old now to keep doing that. So I just keep clothes there.
Did you grow up traveling?
No, but I think it’s because I’m the oldest of four. We had a station wagon, and it was always, “Get in the car. We’re going to the beach.” My grandparents had a beach house in Mantoloking, N.J., and that was the thing.
When I moved to Mexico, I realized I had a lot more freedom with time. And by virtue of having that freedom, there were things I could do that other people weren’t going to be able to do. Like get on that random $400 flight that’ll take me three stops to get to where I’m going.
I also don’t really like travel. I used to get really anxious about turbulence. I’m not going to fly 15 hours to Japan and come back in a week. To me, it’s got to be at least a month.
Do you have a favorite hotel?
I have different criteria, and none of them ever hit all of them for me. Obviously, the bed needs to be good and the room very comfortable and clean. If the room has a beautiful view, great. But I don’t care much about that part.
The bathroom needs to be dope. I care more about the bathroom than the room, maybe. And I really prefer if it has a bathtub. I think a lot of places have some of the components, but they don’t ever have all. And oftentimes, the thing that they’re messing up is the robe.
For my money, I think Sunset Tower in West Hollywood is great. I think it’s better than Chateau. The Chateau rooms just kind of look like you’re in some old-school apartment. Why is there a stove? That’s where you’ve crossed the line into not-hotel.
Which hotels, or cities, are on your must-see list?
I’ve never been to Portugal. I’ve never been to Rio — I want to go to Copacabana. But I have no list. I only go places where I have friends because I’m probably going to stay for a couple months. I want to do stuff and go to the nice restaurants, but actually, I just want to hang and observe and meet some people and see what’s up. I’m not trying to do anything.
There’s a general confusion about this because people are usually like, “Oh, you’re here on holiday?” And I’m like, “Sort of.”
I’m usually there for two months. Anything over 14 days, I think, is something else.
