Michael Dormer
Encyclopedia
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
artist, cartoonist, writer, songwriter, entrepreneur, and creator of famed cartoon personalities Hot Curl
Hot Curl
Hot Curl is a cartoon character created in 1963 by Michael Dormer and Lee Teacher.In 1963, Dormer and his friend, Lee Teacher, sculpted Hot Curl a 400-pound concrete statue, and installed it on the rocks near the surf shack at La Jolla's famed Windansea Beach in San Diego, California. The sculpture...
and 1960s' TV star Shrimpenstein.
A childhood protégé of artist Louis Geddes, Dormer won national recognition at age 12 by taking first prize in a National Fire Prevention poster contest. At 18, Dormer was working as a freelance illustrator and cartoonist for local and national periodicals and creating experimental works of art.
In 1957 Dormer established a painting studio in La Jolla and moonlighted as a part-time night club comic and jazz poet at the Pour House, a cabaret in Bird Rock. He also published an art and poetry magazine, titled Scavenger.
In 1963, Dormer and his friend, Lee Teacher, sculpted Hot Curl
Hot Curl
Hot Curl is a cartoon character created in 1963 by Michael Dormer and Lee Teacher.In 1963, Dormer and his friend, Lee Teacher, sculpted Hot Curl a 400-pound concrete statue, and installed it on the rocks near the surf shack at La Jolla's famed Windansea Beach in San Diego, California. The sculpture...
, a 400 pounds (181.4 kg) concrete statue, and installed it on the rocks near the surf shack at La Jolla
La Jolla, San Diego, California
La Jolla is an affluent, hilly seaside resort community, occupying of curving coastline along the Pacific Ocean in Southern California within the northern city limits of San Diego. La Jolla had the highest home prices in the nation in 2008 and 2009; the average price of a standardized...
's famed Windansea Beach
Windansea Beach
Windansea Beach is stretch of coastline located in La Jolla, a community of San Diego, California. The neighborhood adjacent to the beach is named Windansea after the beach. It is named after an oceanfront hotel that burned down in the late 1940s...
in San Diego, California
San Diego, California
San Diego is the eighth-largest city in the United States and second-largest city in California. The city is located on the coast of the Pacific Ocean in Southern California, immediately adjacent to the Mexican border. The birthplace of California, San Diego is known for its mild year-round...
. The sculpture of a mop-haired, 6 feet (1.8 m), knobby-kneed surfer gazed out at the sea with a beer in his hand. The pot-bellied surf god quickly became a nationwide sensation, appearing in SurfToons comics and as a plastic model kit, selling hundreds of thousands of copies. Today, Hot Curl appears regularly in Surfer magazine
Surfer (magazine)
Surfer magazine is a monthly surfing culture magazine published in San Clemente, California.The magazine was founded by John Severson in 1959 as a program to accompany his yearly surf films...
.
In 1964, Dormer’s artwork was featured in the opening credits of Muscle Beach Party
Muscle Beach Party
Muscle Beach Party is the second of seven beach party films produced by American International Pictures. It was made in 1964 and was directed by William Asher, who also directed four other films in this series...
, which featured the first film appearance of Hot Curl
Hot Curl
Hot Curl is a cartoon character created in 1963 by Michael Dormer and Lee Teacher.In 1963, Dormer and his friend, Lee Teacher, sculpted Hot Curl a 400-pound concrete statue, and installed it on the rocks near the surf shack at La Jolla's famed Windansea Beach in San Diego, California. The sculpture...
and “Little” Stevie Wonder
Stevie Wonder
Stevland Hardaway Morris , better known by his stage name Stevie Wonder, is an American singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, record producer and activist...
. He also doubled as a talent scout for that film and subsequent surf films, recruiting actual surfers and surfer girls off the beaches of La Jolla to serve as extras.
In 1967 Dormer and Teacher created and launched Shrimpenstein, an off-beat children’s television show which aired live weekdays on Channel 9
KCAL-TV
KCAL-TV, channel 9, is an independent television station in Los Angeles, California, USA, owned by the CBS Corporation. KCAL-TV shares its studio facilities with KCBS-TV inside CBS Studio Center in the Studio City section of Los Angeles, and its transmitter is located atop Mount Wilson.-Digital...
in Los Angeles
Los Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
. The program, which featured a miniature Frankenstein
Frankenstein
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a novel about a failed experiment that produced a monster, written by Mary Shelley, with inserts of poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley started writing the story when she was eighteen, and the novel was published when she was twenty-one. The first...
monster, created when his creator, Dr. Von Schtick, accidentally dropped a bag of jelly beans in his monster machine. The wacky adventures and double entendres of the little monster and his eccentric pals enchanted children of all ages, including Frank Sinatra
Frank Sinatra
Francis Albert "Frank" Sinatra was an American singer and actor.Beginning his musical career in the swing era with Harry James and Tommy Dorsey, Sinatra became an unprecedentedly successful solo artist in the early to mid-1940s, after being signed to Columbia Records in 1943. Being the idol of the...
and his Rat Pack
Rat Pack
The Rat Pack was a group of actors originally centered on Humphrey Bogart. In the mid-1960s it was the name used by the press and the general public to refer to a later variation of the group, after Bogart's death, that called itself "the summit" or "the clan," featuring Frank Sinatra, Dean...
.
In 1968, Dormer painted his first aluminum piece. Over the next 20 years, he continued to explore the limits of the medium, creating sculptural paintings that draw the viewer into a magical looking-glass landscape.
Dormer lives in Ocean Beach
Ocean Beach, San Diego, California
Ocean Beach is a beachfront neighborhood of San Diego, California.-Geography:Ocean Beach is located in San Diego on the Southern California coast. It lies on the Pacific Ocean at the estuary of the San Diego River, at the western terminus of Interstate 8. It is approximately from Downtown San...
in San Diego, California. His art is a continuing experiment; each new burst of creativity yielding art that somehow twists the strands of his life into some strange window into another world.