Michael Dormer (artist)

In 1957 Dormer established a painting studio in La Jolla and moonlighted as a night-club comic and jazz poet at the Pour House, a cabaret in Bird Rock.

His vast body of work includes his mid-century Crankshaft series, an extensive collection of nudes, oils, watercolors, sculpture, intricate pencil drawings, charcoals and murals.

Dormer, with his life-long friend and collaborator Lee Teacher, created a counter-culture sculpture Hot Curl,[2] a 400-pound (180 kg) concrete statue, and installed it on the rocks near the surf shack at Windansea Beach in La Jolla in San Diego, California.

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.

[4] In 1963 Dormer and Teacher created and launched Shrimpenstein, an off-beat children's television show which aired live weekdays on Channel 9 in Los Angeles.