Michael McGregor discusses his charming drawings created whilst travelling
Michael McGregor left L.A. in February. Since then, the artist has spent time in London, Paris, the South of France, Sicily and, most recently, Athens. These trips around Europe are regular occurrences for McGregor, and form the basis of his artwork, much of which references the hotels he stays in, the food he eats and the cities he passes through.
A selection of these travels has been captured in the recently-released The Greece Notebook, which comprises 40 pictures drawn during a three month visit to Greece in 2022. The images appear in chronological order of when they were made, each one drawn instantly, capturing a moment that had grabbed McGregor’s attention while travelling through Athens, Corfu and Hydra.
“I didn’t have the intention of putting anything specific into it, so it just became an observational thing,” McGregor says. “After the first few pages, I realised that I didn’t want to fill the whole book up immediately, so I decided instead that I would only do something that grabbed me, leaving enough space between each drawing to give the book a travelogue feel.”
The subjects of the drawings – described by McGregor as “stuff that struck me in the moment” – include dinner tables, vases of flowers and, in one of McGregor’s favourites, two men playing music in Athens. “They were two men playing bouzouki in a square near my hotel in Athens,” he remembers. “I loved their music. I just sat outside having coffee and listening to them and they were ripping. So I thought, you know what, I won’t take a picture of these guys, I’ll draw them right now instead.”
Across McGregor’s Hellenic travels, these drawings replaced the iPhone pictures more often associated with holiday snaps. This is why McGregor refers to the work as snapshots, and the book as a collection of “point and click” images. “If there was this urge normally to take a picture of something, I would just make a drawing of it instead,” he says. “I just hate taking my phone out in public, if you’re walking around all you see is people with their phones out, and I think that if you’re really in the world, observing it and living then you’re probably not on your phone.”
Drawing each of the pictures took longer than taking a photo, obviously, but it also tallied with the slower pace of life that McGregor experienced in Greece. “It’s not like you’re rushing from one thing to another,” he continues. “You’re allowed to sit in the Cafe Neon for three hours, and no one’s going to kick you out. In fact it’s encouraged. And if you’re there for long enough then you’re bound to run into someone.”
Hearing McGregor talk about his time in Greece, he touches on the coincidences that brought him to the country and punctuated his three month spell there. There was the couple interested in buying his work, their offer of an apartment on Corfu just as McGregor was reading The Colossus of Maroussi, there were conversations about books on the beach in Hydra and run-ins with friends and collaborators across Greece and its islands. “There are magical moments that happen, and I feel like they happen very often in Greece,” McGregor says. “There’s something about Greece, something about the looseness of it that allows you to have these happenstance moments. Something happens there.”
While it was these same magical moments that McGregor wanted to document in the off-the-cuff drawings that make up The Greece Notebook, there was a rigid structure to the book he was making. There were only 40 pages to fill, and one mistake in the order could jeopardise the project entirely.
“If I fucked up on one of those pages, the whole book is ruined.” For McGregor, this created a “weird balance” between the need to be rigid and aware of the book’s making while also being loose with its contents. “There’s no time to think about it, if something captures you then you just go with it,” he says of the drawings. “A huge part of it is surrendering to the flow and to the observation and not overthinking it. Whatever colours that you grabbed and whatever you wanted to make, you just do it. It becomes a lot more intuitive that way. You free yourself.”
Throughout the drawings that make up The Greece Notebook, McGregor frequently sketches food and drink. An early image shows four prawns on a plate in Piraeus, while a still life contains a bottle of Campari and a bottle of Alfa beer, and others feature cocktails in a bar, two bowls of gelato or a bottle of tsipouro. “I think it alludes to a lot about how humans interact without really showing it,” McGregor explains of the culinary influence. “You can get a great sense for a scene, or for the conviviality or conversation, and I think everyone can relate to that.”
“I like to use universal truths in my work because it allows people to create their own narratives, it allows people to jump off and insert their own stories into the situation,” he continues. Discussing why he is drawn to these themes, McGregor quotes the poet Mark Doty and his idea of a “tangible vocabulary” of objects. “I think food and drink specifically are a very tangible vocabulary for aesthetics,” he says. “People can relate to them, they’re easy jumping off points and you can abstract and simplify them in great ways. But it’s still clear that they are drinks, even if they aren’t photo realistic, and that’s a way of reworking people’s impressions of things and making them more memory-oriented rather than just matter of fact.”
The Greece Notebook won’t be McGregor’s last book, and already he has projects underway about other places he has visited on his travels. Since he left LA he’s created an 80 page book of drawings from London and Paris – titled Eurostar – as well as collages in the South of France, an Aperitivo book in Sicily and a short artist’s book in Hydra that mixes drawings with prose poetry.
While all of these projects occur in different places, there is something that links them all, something that is central to all of McGregor’s work. “The thread between them is an insatiable appetite for being in the world, for exploring, for feeling alien and alienating myself in foreign lands,” McGregor adds. “It makes me my most vulnerable and opens my eyes, everything becomes new, even if it is familiar. And then I make new acquaintances, new friends, new conversations. I feel best, creatively and spiritually, when my world is expanding.”
The Greece Notebook By Michael McGregor is published by Hyper Hypo
