Regina Hackett
        Seattle Post Intellegencer

Speaking of Matisse, it reminds me of what he said about his own drawings (really the greatest of the century): "They generate light; seen on a dull day, or in direct light they contain, in addition to the quality and sensitivity of line and value, differences which quite clearly correspond to color. These qualities are also evident to many in full light". (1939) Sounds like a Paul Heald to me.

        Matthew Kangas
        Seattle Sun (1980)

One of the most attractive aspects of Heald's work is its ability to link intellectual rigor and high purpose with an unmistakable sense of sheer beauty. His paintings glow with color and light. Both intimate and formal, the paintings invite serious emotional and cerebral responses. Their very multiplicity of resourses and effects make them extraordinary.

        R. M. Campbell
        Seattle Post Intellegencer

Heald's paintings bear out Henry Miller's world view, that chaos is the score on which reality is written. Yet seldom has chaos been wrapped in such a pleasing calm. Heald fuses what are ordinarily thought of as contrasting elements until his work locates itself in its own ground, beyond contrasts and contraries of any kind.

        Regina Hackett
        Seattle Post Intellegencer

They (Heald's paintings)become abstracted visual echoes of the urban landscape, suggesting diffused images of sky-scrapers against pale sky, or high-rises reflected in wind rippled water. And they are very beautiful.

        Delores Tarzan Ament
        Seattle Times

Paul Heald is a LaConner resident about whom everything has been quiet: his development, his recognition, his style, and his subject matter. That being the case, it is deceptive to think that his accomplishmens thus far as a Northwest Artist have been anything other than solid and enduring. The private and personal, is the greater meaning that emerges from his art but it is open for all to share. It is part of the key to this Seattle master's genious.

        Matthew Kangas
        Everett Herald (1981)

For a variety of reasons, it was left to Paul Heald to pick up where the "mystics" left off in their tendencies toward abstraction. Soon after his 1958 arrival in Seattle from Michigan, he proceeded to combine his own researches into modernism with those of the earlier, abortive generation of modernists, the "mystics". Paul Heald is, in effect, the missing link of Pacific Northwest American Art. His transition from "mystic" to modernist- and back- took the form of a search for an art based on geometric forms which employed chromatically sensuous painted surfaces. Toby's and Callahan's tempera was replaced by Heald's thinned-out acrylic which he stained into the canvas. Thus, the sensitive liquidity of "mystic" painting was preserved for another generation.

        Matthew Kangas
        Vanguard Magazine (1982)

Heald's paintings demonstrate the sea-origin of human eyes. His paintings are a sea of feelings, murky yet highly inflected color lights and miasmas of shifting form. His canvases are truly aquatic, with their fluid sense of mutating form and densely dappled color. The forms that seem solid fade and emerge again in other sections of his canvases. Lines skip and somehow fail to meet, and greenish-blue or silver blue tonalities rain down over Heald's ever changing surfaces.

        Regina Hackett
        Seattle Post Intellegencer

The painter who proceeded from dark thick abstraction to carnival-colored funk to eloquent and luminous geometrics, certainly deserves a large audience. His light-filled paintings are stylistically sure, richly varied, "sensuously dynamic". His use of color is dramatic not in a theatrical sense but in the way it quietly but persuasively makes its mark on the eye and mind of the viewer.

        R. M. Campbell
        Seattle Post Intellegencer
 

The tensions arising from Heald's merger of the vulgar and the exquisite are those one might expect if Sir Walter Scott had collaborated with William Burroughs on "Naked Lunch".

        Tom Robbins
        Art in America (1968)

Paul Heald, in addition to having produced some of the most immaculately painted pictures ever to come out of Seattle, is rapidly being hailed as an important historical link between the first major era of Nothwest art, the Big Four or so called "mystic" painters, and the current modern (or as some would have it ), "post-modern" period. Although he is an abstract geometric artist quite unlike Kenneth Callahan, Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, or Guy Anderson, Heald's place in Northwest art rests exactly on his mixture of traditional modern forms (squares, rectangles, diagonals ) with a sense of ecstatic, emotional and yes, "mystical experience.

The growth of Heald's technical mastery alone will provide joy and thought for at least one viewing. Beyond that, it will become clear to those who look before they think, that one other quality also informs the art of Paul Heald: Seattle's ambient daylight. That ever shifting phenomenon-so central to this history of modern art in Seattle- is the link between Heald's art and the world we see around us. More and more, it shall be seen as the unknown key to much of the art of this area. It was Paul Heald who opened the window, so to speak, and let the light of modernism shine through.

        Matthew Kangas
        Spectrum, "Profile of an Artist"

A leading Northwest artist whose talent and artistic vision border on genious, Heald is a master of form and technique. The paintings trancend mere visual beauty and elicit a profound emotional and intellectual response from the viewer.

        Susan Calderon
        Bellevue Journal American

In totality, his art is one of the most impressive, sustained, creative endeavors ever to appear in this region.

        Matthew Kangas