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The Dirt

The faces of Davis: Local shipping store is home to heartfelt portrait gallery

By: Sonora Slater for The Dirt

There are 85 portraits hanging on the walls of PDQ Parcel Dispatch — nearly a hundred faces staring back while you address your package or pick out your stamps. If you’ve lived in Davis long enough, you’ll likely recognize one or two; together, they comprise the people of the City, from business owners to box runners, memorialized in a meandering building down long hallways and stacked against the walls of the F Street shipping store. 

The portrait gallery is the passion project of long-time PDQ owner and artist Lynn Christensen, a Davis resident who for years has been filling the walls of his family business with familiar faces, painted at his home studio. His only formal painting experience comes from a watercolor class he took years ago at the Davis Arts Center, but time, practice, and reading every art book at the library several times has given him quite the skillset. 

“It’s a customer retention program,” Christensen quipped when asked how the unlikely art gallery began. “If you have a painting of your customer, they’ll want to come back.” 

It’s a joke, but it is true that many, if not most, of his portraits are of customers. After painting one of the shop’s regular UPS drivers on a whim years ago, it snowballed. Now every week or so his wife, Laura, sends him a picture of some new person and he gets to work capturing their likeness on an 8×10 canvas — a welcome change, he says, from the days when he would spend hours driving the streets of Woodland or the countryside looking for a subject worthy of stopping for. 

“You’re always looking for something that stimulates you to want to paint,” Christensen said. “This has been wonderful. Can you imagine? I don’t have to go out and look for things — every other day my wife will have a picture of another customer.” 

When he’s done, some of them go up on the walls of PDQ, while others are stacked in his office, in his garage, or hung in the homes of the people who he paints. Some of these lucky recipients ask if they can pay for the art, but Christensen isn’t looking to make money from the venture. 

“Somebody gave me [a note] many years ago, and it’s in my office here,” Christensen said. “It says, ‘You only get to keep what you give away.’” 

Beyond a constant stream of inspiration, Christensen says the paintings have also given him a sense of connection with people around him, especially as he experiences being separated by distance from people he cares about, or by partial retirement from daily interactions with the customers he’s grown to know so well, and even, for some of his painting subjects, being separated by sickness or death. These people are memorialized on his walls, allowing their stories to be told often at the inquiry of curious customers, and allowing him to, in a sense, spend a week with that person while he paints them.

“I really enjoyed working with the public at the counter,” Christensen said. “When I’m retired, it helps me feel like I’m still with everybody. Sometimes I cannot believe how many I’ve been able to paint now — so, so many. Life goes fast.” 

It is true that part of Christensen’s talent at portrait painting likely comes from the sheer number of paintings that he’s done, and the repetition of the process, learning how to layer oil paint, and how to sometimes step away before coming back to the painting with a fresh perspective. But he’s also learned by studying the greats — Michelangelo, and Van Gogh. And beyond their practical painting techniques, Christensen described life lessons he’s gleaned from these masters of the arts. 

In Van Gogh’s final two years of life, he painted more than 30 self-portraits. In fact, although Christensen acknowledged that most people, when thinking of the acclaimed artist’s work, are likely to picture Starry Night, or the Sunflowers series, he noted that in Van Gogh’s famous letters to his brother, he often meditated on how essential portraits were to an artist’s craft. 

“The thing I think about is that he didn’t have anybody to paint,” Christensen said. “He was all by himself. And so he was just focused on himself and everything he’s going through, whereas I have a person who just gives me a photo and I can paint. I don’t know if people appreciate the fact that I paint them, but they really are doing it for me. It keeps you sane — we’ll take Van Gogh out of that. But it keeps you centered.”

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