Thomas McDonell’s recent paintings bring together discarded and forgotten textiles, layers of paint, and a physical approach to making that begins with the material itself.
Across the works, McDonell uses textiles that already carry traces of use, labor, and history, often stitching disparate fabrics together before applying paint directly with his hands. Patterns, textures, and signs of wear remain partially visible beneath layers of pigment, while the materials themselves influence the application of paint, color, and composition. Place also plays a role in the work, with paintings made in different locations shaped by the materials available to him. McDonell’s connection to Aspen is a personal one, shaped through longstanding family ties to the Aspen Institute and the community.
We spoke with McDonell about his choice of materials, the physical process of making a painting, and the ways place and availability inform his work.
Your studio is inside a textile warehouse in Los Angeles, and many of the fabrics you paint on are remnants you find there. How has being surrounded by this abundance of material shaped the paintings?
Texture is important. Even when the fabric is painted over, and you don’t see the texture exactly, you feel it in the finished painting. The fabric also influences the way the paint is put down. A thick embroidered drapery fabric stretched over strainers like a canvas calls for a different application of paint.
The yellow painting in Aspen is almost like a color field painting, but within that field there’s a lot of action on the surface, starting with the substrate, this thick drapery textile. The paint is put down in a way that echoes the material: the color, the cadence.
As for abundance, it feels good to have more than enough material. You don’t have to be picky or fussy or overly fastidious. Too much material is no good either, though. So, balance.
Thomas McDonell
Untitled (West Washington Blvd, Yellow Field), 2026
Alkyd enamel, padauk frame, 66 1/2 x 92 1/2 in
You often apply paint directly with your hands. What does that physical contact with the material allow you to do?
There’s a directness to putting the paint on by hand. You get speed and immediacy. Getting rid of the brush, the tool, the computer, CAD, 3-D printer, airbrush, holographic projection, whatever, was about trying to get back, back, back to the first moment, the root of the impulse. Where does art come from? How far can you trace it? Cave paintings? The Makapansgat pebble? Biological ancestors?
The paintings are, in a way, sculptures of paintings. You take the materials you’d use to make a painting, paint, fabric, stretcher bars, and put it all together by hand, and that’s that. Painterly ideas of color, flow, and composition come in afterward. They sort of creep in.
I want the paintings to be the material they’re made out of, rather than create an illusion of something else, like a picture. In that way, they’re kind of like minimalist sculptures that look like expressionistic abstractions.
Color plays such a strong role in the work. How do place and the materials available to you determine a painting’s palette?
I make the paintings with paint that is around, often alkyd urethane enamel or house paint. You don’t have to buy it. So the palette is largely defined by what’s available.
Places are different, so paintings made in Los Angeles look different from paintings made in Northern California, for example. The painting you have that looks like it has two big eyes, I made in the little town of Point Reyes Station. The colors of disused house paint mirror and counterpoint that landscape and atmosphere: whites, off-whites, desaturated greens, and light golden browns.
What does a typical day in the studio look like? Are there any habits or rituals that help you get into the rhythm of working?
I’m writing this from a little café across the street from the drapery warehouse where my studio is. I’m on a laptop. I don’t have Wi-Fi at the studio anymore. I got rid of it, which is a big change. It’s good for focusing on the paintings.
It’s impossible to be untangled from technology at this point, and that’s not the goal either, but it’s nice not to have that hook in all the time.
MATERIALITY is on view through September 30, 2026.