Picture this: Shelter Bay man links 1970s art with artist

For more than a decade, wherever he moved, Danny Hagen could not bear to part with the beautiful eight square foot framed painting of Mount Shuksan and Picture Lake that he picked up by chance while on a job in Bellingham.

He knew the painting’s setting and appreciated its artistry. He just did not have a clear picture of its backstory.

Until now.

Hagen, a Shelter Bay resident who is an appraiser with the Skagit County Assessor’s Office, took to social media last week with a blanket request for information related to the painting, hoping to solve its lingering mysteries and looking for leads for refurbishing its weathered frame.

Responses were many and immediate. And among those who chimed in was the artist herself – Sharon London Marcantel of Darrington.

“That is a blast from the past,” Marcantel said upon reading Hagen’s post. “I can see this was an early work of mine.”

Marcantel created the stunning image in the mid-1970s, not long after launching her career.

“I just started to learn how to paint in 1970,” she told Hagen, “and did this for a guy named Bill Christianson.”

Christianson lived in Snohomish, Marcantel recalled, and wanted the painting to be big but knew it would take a large bite out of his budget. Perhaps as much as $500.

So, they worked out a deal.

“He offered me a beef he was going to butcher,” she said. “He got his painting, and I got a freezer full of beef.”

Christianson died a few years later, the painting lost all but to memory.

“I always wondered who ended up with it,” Marcantel said. “Gosh, it still looks good.”

Hagen was able to fill in a few blanks. He told the Weekly News: “I worked for a moving company 10 years ago in Bellingham, A guy we moved was going to throw it out because it was too big.”

Unlike his client, Hagen recognized the painting’s value.

“I told him I’d take it,” Hagen said. “I got back to the depot and it almost didn’t fit in my back seat. I rolled down the two back windows so the corners wouldn’t get smashed and drove it to my parents’ farm, where it sat for five years.

“Then,” he said, “when we moved out to La Conner, I stored it in our garage. Last month, I was doing some cleaning and my curiosity got the best of me. So, I wanted to see if there was a backstory to it.”

Turns out, there was. Even so, missing pieces to the puzzle remain. No one is quite sure how the painting wound up in Bellingham.

Fortunately, the future is more certain. Hagen will take the painting to Darrington next spring for Marcantel to clean its surface and redo the frame’s fading colors.

“I’m anxious to see it after all these years,” Marcantel told Hagen. “Thank you for saving it.”