You Never Give Me Your Money

This past spring, 65 paintings, illustrations, and collages by the late San Diego artist Michael Dormer went up for auction on eBay. The works varied in size and complexity—most being multi-hued abstracts in acrylic, made by the artist between 1967 and 1993—and ranged in price from $1800 to $8400. 

Despite the online seller—a San Diego-based art dealer named Travis Samuel—describing the hoard as “one of the most impressive artist collections I have ever purchased,” none have yet sold. Samuel, who specializes in buying artist estates, sells exclusively on the internet. Since spring, his prices on the Dormers have dropped significantly. To the discerning collector of this artist, of which there are few, these paintings reveal a new side of Dormer, heretofore known as the creator of surfing’s first comic strip—“Hot Curl”—and thereby one of the originators of West Coast low-brow art.

Dormer’s Hot Curl was a surfboard totin’, beer swillin’ beach bum with blonde hair hanging down over his eyes and an outsized schnoz. From 1959 to 1962 he appeared regularly in the artist’s own Beat Generation zine, Scavenger, and in the comics section of the La Jolla Light. By 1963, Hot Curl was ubiquitous in Southern California surf culture: on decals and t-shirts, in the pages of surf magazines, appearing in the AIP film Muscle Beach Party, as well as on the beach at Windansea, where a ten-foot concrete statue looked out over the break. Territorial skirmishes in 1964 saw the statue decapitated, but Dormer continued on.

He made drawings for copious surf advertisements and did regular illustrations for Surf Guide, Surftoons, Surfing Illustrated, and other publications. He also created the local kids TV show Shrimpenstein on KHJ-Channel 9 in Los Angeles—a favorite of Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack. Then Dormer disappeared from the popular landscape.

According to the artist’s widow, Francis “Flicki” Dormer, his successes in the commercial world ran parallel to a more serious private work, which is where Dormer focused his efforts from 1966 to the end of his life. “Michael wanted to be known as a fine artist,” she says from her home in Ocean Beach, where the couple lived together for 50 odd years. 

She recalls the artist trying to shop his paintings around to galleries in Los Angeles, where Dormer was born in 1935. He and Flicki met in the mid-50s at a party in La Jolla after she’d moved to San Diego from Syracuse, to work as a programmer for the computer division of General Dynamics. Dormer was scraping by then on freelance illustration gigs for men’s magazines like Escapade, which also featured content by Beat Generation icons like Jack Kerouac. 

At the same time, Dormer painted murals, played ukulele, and read live poetry at the Pour House, a local beatnik hangout in La Jolla. He may’ve also come under the influence of muralist Burt Shonberg, who owned the scandalous Cafe Frankenstein in Laguna Beach and shared with Dormer a distinctive illustrative blend of sci-fi art, surrealism, and abstract expressionism—all styles that would prove an animating impulse in the creation of Dormer’s droopy, stylized Hot Curl.

By the early 60s, the iconoclasm of surf and hot rod art became emblematic of California’s new self-confidence. A social revolution had stimulated an artistic one, and after Dormer and Flicki married, the artist took on an expanded role in the nascent counter-culture. She became the breadwinner; Dormer kept illustrating and entered various art competitions at the San Diego Museum of Art where, according to Flicki, he never won but was placed prominently in several group shows. As the surf comic craze died out around the close of the decade, Dormer delved deeper into the life of a studio painter. 

Few of the works that Travis Samuel has for sale on eBay are titled. If Dormer had labeled them in the past, their designations are now gone. Some are dated, like the pastel and ink drawing on paper dated 1968. This piece looks like a cross between John Altoon’s biomorphic abstracts of the mid-60s and Salvador Dalí’s many surrealist landscapes of the prewar era. To the left is a bulbous, slightly humanoid figure, with fractured swatches of tertiary color that create inner-worlds opening one after the other. To the right are two moons and a pile of rocks. A crucifix stands at its apex. The inscrutability is both distinguishing and mesmeric.

In another, a powder blue skyline across the top of the canvas gives way to a luminous landscape of color washes below. A billowy wave-like shape looks soak-stained and poured, like that of the 60s abstract expressionist Helen Frankenthaler, except that Dormer’s brushwork is smooth and flat, indicating a draughtsman’s technique applied to abstraction with the alacrity of an artist whose lifetime of resources had been well-harvested. Does its low price tag today—and the general ignorance of the public to Dormer’s oeuvre—suggest a lack of originality or significant talent? Might I offer instead that Dormer was simply underrepresented and a bit out of step with his time.

Indeed, by 1968, new programs such as Minimalism, Performance Art, and Conceptualism became the gold standard in the galleries around New York City and along La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles. A-listers like Richard Serra, Bruce Nauman, and Carl Andre—armed with the Marxist rhetoric of 30s social critics from Frankfurt and Paris—looked at traditional art-making as an elitist enterprise, fueled by the false aura of one-of-a-kind works. The new art, they determined, called for serial geometry, obvious construction, and an end to painterly illusion. None of which had any effect on Dormer, because, according to Flicki, he avoided art shows. “He didn’t want to be influenced by it,” she insists. Little surprise then that a personal art became private, then forgotten, and finally lost.

During the 1970s, Dormer made several new attempts at commercial illustration, including t-shirt designs and political comics. Travis Samuel says the latter were part of a proposed marijuana magazine Dormer was working on in 1971. A few satirical sketches—of angry GOP mascots and straight-laced couples with TV consuls for heads—were in keeping with the ribald humor of 70s spoofs such as Groove Tube (1974) and Tunnel Vision (1976). Yet on the whole, topicality was not Dormer’s forté. Ambiguity was.

The artist soon started in on a new series of works rendered with paint applied to flat aluminum surfaces, which Dormer sealed using toxic resins. According to Flicki, he is still the only artist she’s ever known to attempt it. In one example—dated 1981—Dormer has four quasi-cubist cartoon figures meeting on an open path. Word bubbles above their heads offer conversation in a cryptic language of letters, runes, and hieroglyphs. The work has an undeniably strange, Disney-on-LSD sensibility, though Flicki says Dormer never took acid or any hallucinogen. Toward the end of his life the artist ruminated on his program: “My works [are] essentially excursions into alternate fantasy dimensions. Odd creatures abound in these regions and strange allegories unfold. New languages are born and mingle freely with conjured-up communicative symbols.”

The couple exhibited these and other works by Dormer in a solo show mounted at their house in Ocean Beach. A few sold, though not many. By this time Dormer’s son Zachary, from his first marriage, moved in with he and Flicki, yet she says the junior Dormer drank too much and the setup was ultimately not a happy one. (She and Dormer never had children of their own.) 

Through the 80s and 90s the artist held shows at small local galleries in the San Diego area. In the early 2000s, Surfer magazine briefly revived Hot Curl, while a group of Hollywood producers tried to persuade Dormer to pitch a new Shrimpenstein for the Nickelodeon network. (Flicki calls the attempt a “disaster,” saying: “They disagreed on everything!”) A final gallery show was held in the mid-2000s, with Dormer exhibiting a new series of 3D paintings—cutout shapes on magnet, which could be assembled on the canvas according to the viewer’s preference. Travis Samuel says that Dormer wanted to patent the idea for kids, but it failed to catch on. Flicki confirms: “They were not a big hit.”

By the time Dormer passed away on September 10, 2012, his contribution to West Coast art and surf culture had slipped into obscurity. Hot Curl is still occasionally toted out for the odd surf-art retrospective and it remains the current mascot of La Jolla High School’s surf team. Yet Dormer is not a household name and is mostly unacknowledged by the curators of lowbrow art and by Juxtapoz magazine. An author and longtime friend of the Dormers named Michael Powers is seeking to change that with a forthcoming anthology on the artist—titled Mike Dormer and the Legend of Hot Curl—to be published in summer 2017 by Fantagraphics. Their specialty is illustration and comics, though Powers insists it will include some of Dormer’s fine art samples as well. The author is also planning a Dormer gallery show in Los Angeles to coincide with the book’s release, though thus far no agreement has been made with Travis Samuel to procure or consign the 65 paintings currently on sale through eBay. Their fate, like Dormer’s own legacy, remains unclear at the moment.

[Feature image: Artist self-portrait: Dormer surrounded by his many comic creations, including Shrimpenstein (upper left) and Hot Curl (lower right). Courtesy of the Dormer Estate and Jason Powers.]