W. Paul Heald

1936 - 2014

W. Paul Heald

December 17, 1936 ~ December 1, 2014

Paul Heald, an artist whose luminous, elegant abstractions bridged the Northwest mystic and modernist schools of painting, died on December 1 in Swedish Hospital, just shy of his 78th birthday.

Mr. Heald, who arrived in Seattle on the cusp of the Sixties to earn a master's degree in painting at the University of Washington, soon became an active participant in the city's burgeoning cultural scene. His graphic art work appeared in The Helix, Seattle's first alternative newspaper, and his paintings inspired Tom Robbins to wax metaphorical in a 1968 review for Art in America.

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

That sensibility was in perfect keeping with the absurdist Bay area funk art movement, with which Mr. Heald was closely associated while living and painting in San Francisco for a few years in the mid-60s. But after retrenching in Seattle, his vision turned to the glowing geometric paintings for which he would become best known-remarkable, as one critic noted, for their juxtaposition of intellectual rigor and sheer beauty.

Mr. Heald's attraction to apparent incongruities may have begun with his lineage. He enjoyed pointing out that he was a direct descendent of the Puritan minister Cotton Mather, whose fire-and-brimstone sermons were in stark contrast to his own aura of meditative depth.

Like most of the "big four" Northwest mystic painters whose mantle he inherited and progressed (Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan, Guy Anderson, Mark Tobey), Mr. Heald planted roots in the Skagit Valley as well as Seattle.

As ballast for his various urban studios, he retreated to an idyllic water-front cabin outside La Conner, Washington. There he fished, boated, grew geraniums and absorbed the interplay of light, land, and water that, as his paintings make clear, he saw down to its molecules.

Perhaps best known in Seattle for his long association with the William Traver Gallery, Mr. Heald produced work that is represented in numerous public, private and corporate collections, and also in those of over forty museums, both in the States and abroad. He held several art faculty posts, including a position at the Cornish Institute of Allied Arts, from 1968 to 1973.

In 1977, he was among the highly skilled artists who founded Artech, a company that answered the city's urgent need for professional fine arts handling. Artech also answered an urgent need for the artists whom it first employed, including Mr. Heald-a paycheck to support studio work. After becoming a fulltime artist, he continued to serve on Artech's board of directors for 30 years, during which time Artech continued to expand and hire subsequent generations of artists.

Mr. Heald was the second of three sons born in Port Huron, Michigan, to Laura Cotton Heald and Maurice E. Heald. His brothers not only became successful artists in their own right, but followed him to the Pacific North-west. Maury, the eldest, a graphic artist who created the Frito emblem, died in 1997. Larry, the youngest-a noted landscape painter who also designed a number of iconic book and album covers-lives in La Conner.

Mr. Heald and Sandra Terry had a son, Casual Augustus Heald, who died in a 1983 car accident at the age of 12. Besides his brother, he is also survived by April Kulp, his companion of 28 years; sister-in-law, Dana; niece, Sierra; cousin, Hester Angus; and former wife, Sheila Gale Farr.

A memorial is yet to be arranged.