Mary McDonnell (b. 1959) is a contemporary American abstract painter whose distinctive practice extends the great tradition of American gestural painting into the present moment with an unmistakably personal voice. After many years working from a Brooklyn loft, McDonnell moved her practice to a rural setting in New York State, where she designed and helped build a two-story clapboard studio surrounded by woods. Working close enough to New York City to maintain her connections with the gallery scene while enjoying the solitude her practice requires, she has established one of the distinctive contemporary studios in American painting, complete with high windows, skylights, a loft for viewing paintings from above, and a floor that serves as her working ground.

McDonnell's paintings are made primarily on wood panels heavily prepared with successive coats of gesso, worked from every possible angle as she moves around and even straddles the pieces on her studio floor. Her toolkit is unusually inventive, incorporating household brooms, stiff bamboo brooms from Chinatown, sticks gathered from the forest floor, and custom-made implements developed with fellow artists and mold-makers, including a signature brush held in place by silicone-soaked burlap between a pair of paint stirrers. She favors the pigment-rich oil paints of the late Carl Plansky's Williamsburg Handmade line, along with abundant turpentine and rags, giving her a broad range of tones, textures, and marks that carry the vocabulary of her mature practice.

McDonnell's work draws deeply on the American abstract tradition, particularly the drawings of Philip Guston, the massed strokes of Joan Mitchell, and the architectural gestures of Franz Kline and Bradley Walker Tomlin, while remaining rooted in her own hard-won painterly voice. Her series, including the Invitation paintings and Willard's Red, along with her large diptychs and works on paper, demonstrate the fluid movement between structural rigor and gestural release that defines her work. She speaks of the process as a kind of stalking, in which the picture reveals itself only through extended conversation between painter and panel.

McDonnell's paintings have been the subject of critical essays, including thoughtful appreciations by the poet and critic William Corbett, and her work is appreciated for its earned spontaneity, its resonant surfaces, and its sustained commitment to keeping the American gestural tradition genuinely alive in the contemporary moment.