At a pub near Savile Row, imports of Italian origin. Contributor to magazines Kennedy and Interview, Michael McGregor swapped writing for painting at age thirty-two, and in the seven years since his colourful canvases have sailed the world. We ordered a round, then another, then I stopped counting, while talking drugs and art and hotels, and the permanent ink of dead pens.
FIFTH-GRADE FIELD TRIP TO THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
Where we lived was right on the sea. Lot of bankers. Huge houses. Peak eighties country club life: the epicentre of Lacoste, Ralph Lauren, tennis, golf. The aesthetics seeped into me. Pastels, stripes, loafers. At the same time you have a train that can get you into Manhattan in forty-five minutes. It’s the intersection between cosmopolitan and country. Which is still how I operate. Los Angeles is a big suburb, like Atlanta. You’re separated from random human interaction unless you’re in the mall.
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF GUCCI MANE: A STORY OF RAP AND REBIRTH
When he was first coming up he beat somebody up in Lenox Mall. I love Gucci Mane. Have you read his autobiography? Dude, it’s insanely good. He wrote it in jail, coming off codeine. With Jeezy, they had huge beef, and there was a break-in at some house where they were flipping dope. He shot at Jeezy and killed one of his friends. The way it’s written sounds like it was dictated into a phone, like Gucci Mane is talking to you. He talks about trapping at the Texaco. You can picture this Texaco: super run-down, crack-heads running through the parking lot.
THOMPSON THE MORALIST, KEROUAC THE NOVELIST, GINSBERG THE CONFESSOR
In the mid-sixties they started doing acid tests, which were events where you would come into this environmental space, like a colosseum or roller rink, and everyone would get dosed. The Dead were the band for all these events—the soundtrack of LSD. Age eleven, twelve, I started to read about it. So by the time I got to college and encountered some, I wasn’t scared. Tripping can be very useful, for mental health, but also for not taking stuff so seriously all the time. Seeing the world in a different way, of course. Stuff you take for granted. Which is kind of what most of my art is about too.
WORKING IN CLASSICAL GENRES IN A REALLY SIMPLIFIED WAY
Still life is one of the oldest continuous motifs in art history. The first were Flemish, in the sixteen-hundreds. And they were displays of wealth—a patron would have a painter come to their house and paint their belongings. This is what I have. This is my silver goblet. Pineapples are a great one. There was no fucking pineapple in Europe in the sixteen-hundreds. The cost of a pineapple in that time was equivalent today to fifteen-thousand dollars. So if you had a pineapple you were like, I’m hiring this guy to fucking paint this. A crazier part is if you were having a party and you wanted to seem richer than you were, you could rent pineapples. So if you look at these still life oftentimes they look like they’re kind of rotting.
Telling a narrative about the person whose objects it is, without the person being there, is something I really like. I have a lot of objects that are meaningless, but they mean something to me. My mom’s wooden tennis racket from when she was a kid, always on the wall in my room no matter where I’ve lived. My grandmother’s old trophies which are little silver goblets—Women’s Doubles Champ 1966. I have a couple vases I brought back from Morocco, which tend to find themselves in paintings throughout the years.
A CITRUSY BREEZE I RECOGNIZE
Henry Miller’s Colossus of Maroussi takes place in the thirties, non-fiction. He basically goes to Greece after living in France for ten years and he’s like, alright, I’m gonna take a year off and not write at all, just live. He’s travelling around Greece and meets guys who are poets, writers, painters of the time. So I explored the full network of this book and anybody mentioned in it. Ghikas, probably the best Greek painter, they were visiting him a bunch. This dude Patrick Lee Firmer, this other guy John Craxton. Lawrence Durrell. George Seferis, Greek poet from that time. I think he won a Nobel Prize.
The web points me to different places that come back to the same stuff. Henry Miller leaves Greece and moves to Big Sur, and becomes part of the pre-hippie bohemian counterculture of what would evolve into Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco. He was the precursor of that seed. This is a very psychedelic thing—it’s all interconnected. It is. All these people knew each other. And hung out. In 1944. In Turkey. You think you know everything…then you keep learning.
BEING PAMPERED OR TRYING TO ESCAPE FROM SOMETHING
I think my sister got married; she was staying at The Ritz, maybe in Paris. I was like, bring me some of that paper. And immediately people started gravitating towards it, at a certain point thinking I was living out of five-star hotels. I realised it was a way to create an illusion of this mysterious person who lives in a hotel. The other part of that—I loved the Ludwig Bemelmans stuff, and a kids book called Eloise, and obviously, Home Alone 2, where he stays at The Plaza and is ordering room service—I always thought that was the coolest.
I did all these drawings on various London stationery: May Fair, Churchill, Ritz, Claridge’s, the Langham. Really grimy and really institutionally posh things together—you create an interesting conundrum for people. I think they’re funny, too. Which is something I like in art.
DAVID HOCKNEY’S DRY-CLEANING
When we were little kids and had art class, you’re supposed to wear a smock; my mom would would just give us my dad’s work shirts that had been starched too many times. I grew up wearing an Oxford button-down to go to art class…in Kindergarten. I still buy Brooks Brothers shirts one size too big for me to wear to the studio. A lot of my work has dry cleaning. So much of when I was a kid, we were just driving around, mom’s gotta pick up the dry cleaning.
At the same time I feel like my drawings are kind of childish. Maybe I haven’t evolved out of my six-year-old self, sitting between shirts hanging from both windows.
London, December ninth
McGregor’s website