Duane Flatmo Wants to Wow

Standing in the glow of El Pulpo Magnifico — artist Duane Flatmo’s massive, motorized, flame-shooting, scrap metal octopus — is a physical experience. As anyone who’s encountered it in the desert plain of Burning Man or its December Arts Alive appearance in 2022 will recall, the plumes of propane flame turn its silver body a molten bronze and emit a chest-thrumming roar along with a blast of heat that, depending how close you are, might prompt you to check whether your eyebrows remain.

On Saturday, June 13, El Pulpo’s tentacles will fire up downtown again at the dedication of Duane Flatmo Alley on F Street between Fourth and Fifth streets. The newly minted street signs, already installed, honor Flatmo’s artistic and cultural contributions to the community, most visibly through his murals around the county and perhaps most enduringly through his dozen years teaching young people to paint them. 

Flatmo has worked in comedy and music, made gear-encrusted furniture and hand-cranked sculptures, built and piloted kinetic sculptures and designed logos and labels for Humboldt businesses, making himself a sort of style ambassador beyond our borders via beer labels and music festival posters. Flatmo’s personal aesthetic shows in varying degrees in his hired work and collaborative murals. But in his drawings, paintings and sculptures, there is humor, joy and playfulness that are as much his signature as the frenetic cartoon cubism that’s become his trademark.

If Flatmo were to name a spiritual touchstone, he jokes it might be Bozo the Clown, a stuffed doll of whom he slept with as a child. Over the years, his 88-year-old mother Jeanne has sent him little sewn and glued yarn images of clowns he made when he was growing up in Huntington Beach — even a banister filial he carved a face onto and topped with a wig of yarn. To this day, he still loves a clown, especially the gruesome kind, he admits with a chuckle.

As a kid, his class clownery extended to home, where he’d prank his sister with elaborate string traps that would topple books, unmake her bed and render her room a mess when she opened the door. This required exiting through the window and drawing her ire, but it was worth it, Flatmo says, clearly enjoying the memory as he sketches out the angles in the air with stretched arms and hands.

He recalls once flashing a mirror in the sunlight in a third-floor room in his childhood home and deciding to gather all the mirrors in the house. With 15 or so collected from walls and his mother’s vanity, he taped them along corners and stairs all the way down to the basement, allowing him to shine light from upstairs on his mother when she came through the door before the sun moved. “I didn’t have a reason, but it was cool to see it happen,” he says with a gap-toothed grin. It could serve as a succinct artist’s statement for Flatmo.

Flatmo wears a striped cotton Oxford with the sleeves buttoned, an olive cap and squared glasses, his hands flying as he talks. “My mom and dad both Sunday painted,” says Flatmo, inspiring him to paint and take classes as they did. An oil painting class mostly taught him it was not his medium — his mother still has his adolescent attempts at flowers in vases. 

Duane’s father Oistein Flatmo immigrated from Norway at 19 with little English and visions of John Wayne Westerns in his head, never to see his parents again. “He wasn’t afraid. He’d jump right in,” Flatmo says of his father, who was drafted during the Korean War. Oistein, who built their family home, managed a crew painting track homes, sometimes with Duane’s help sanding and puttying walls and taping windows. 

Duane Flatmo says he branched out with drawing in high school, pulling inspiration from nearby Disneyland, cartoonists Rube Goldberg, R. Crumb and Mad Magazine’s Jack Davis. “I learned my anatomy from Jack Davis,” he says. Their influence shows in the work he made in the 1980s, ink drawings using crosshatching and watercolors with comic commentary. He studied at Grossmont College, then later, after his 1977 move to Humboldt, in his mentor Jere Smith’s class at College of the Redwoods. For the latter, the final project was a company logo. The resulting spilled ink bottle image for Flatmo Graphics became his first professional branding as he sought gigs making signs around town. 

In 1984, Flatmo took the job putting an L.W. Duke painting on the side of the Bucksport building. “I knew I could do it,” he says, since he’d learned the technique of working from a drawing on a grid and transferring the scaled-up image to the wall. He just hadn’t done it yet. “I knew if I had to, I could look it up.” Still, Flatmo admits, “I was nervous that I was gonna mess it up.” But once he got started and got the feel for it, he was on his way.  

There’s a “paint by numbers” element to the work, he says, explaining how he’d mark out spaces for shades of color rather than blending them on the surface. He recalls numbering the caps of nine different magentas to paint sections of the ballerina’s skirt on back wall of the Arkley Center for the Performing Arts. “It was really technical,” Flatmo says. 

For that mural, he says, Cherie Arkley wanted theatrical elements, like dancers and musicians. Fresh from a trip to France, Flatmo drew from his photos of the Luxembourg Gardens and the Arc de Triomphe, added dancer Cyd Charisse and musicians he found in a book. Using Photoshop, he applied the elements to an image of the building. “She just about shit,” he says, still visibly proud. “I think I [asked for] $25 or $35 a square foot and when I went back home, I thought, ‘Wow, that’s a lot of money.’ But they went, ‘All right,’” he says, clapping his hands together.

Working for clients, whether on a mural or designs for Foxfarm Soil and Fertilizer Co., always meant starting with their visions and bringing in his own ideas. “I want to impress ’em,” says Flatmo. It’s also what he says about his own goals for a mural. “I want people to go, ‘Wow!’” he says. “I don’t think murals have to say anything. They can just be beautiful pieces.” 

But not everyone loved what he was doing, and the early days of public art meant jumping through lots of hoops to get the city to approve images. There were, he says, concerns the work he was doing with youth through the challengingly named Rural Burl Mural Bureau didn’t suit surrounding buildings.

“A mural shouldn’t blend in,” Flatmo says. “It should be a breath of fresh air when you come around a corner.” 

Working with the community was part of what the students learned along with painting. That included attending meetings. “They were getting stuck in my class for community service for doing graffiti,” he says with a wide smile, so they learned to work with building owners and do more than they could with stolen minutes and a spray can. 

“I loved that class,” Flatmo says, the window light whiting out his glasses. “That’s what I did instead of having kids, you know. There are plenty of kids out there who need help,” he says. For 12 years of weekends, he taught them the ropes and helped them paint murals around town. “I’d tell them, ‘I’m not your parent and I’m not your teacher. I’m right here in between.’”

One of his favorite Rural Burl Mural Bureau’s pieces is “Inharmonious,” painted on plywood and attached to the wall at Fifth and F streets in Eureka. The title speaks to issue of murals blending into their surroundings. A model of eclecticism, it’s comprised of students’ individually created images that Flatmo patched together. “It’s still holding up,” he says. “It still looks nice.” 

How outdoor art holds up is another issue Flatmo feels strongly about. “We don’t want to become, Eureka: the land of faded murals.” Another Bureau piece beside the Courthouse Market, “Animals are People Too,” for which students cut out animal heads from magazines and placed them on human bodies, needs refreshing before it starts to peel, he says. “Instead of new murals every year, you need to take a year and restore some of these.” 

Painter and sculptor Micki Flatmo wears jade green and tortoise glasses and a white button down, swirling silver bracelets on each wrist. She first met Duane when she was an advertising director, designing everything from print ads to window displays at Bistrin’s retail clothing store and hired him to do silkscreening at a better price than someone else. Back then, Duane was roller skating everywhere, zipping around handing off drawings, invoices and receipts, including to Bistrin’s. She remembers seeing him delivering to Bistrin’s from up on a ladder when she was putting up a marquee for a sale one day. “He roller skated off and I thought, ‘Hmm. That’s a really different kind of guy.’” 

Underbidding Micki’s former silkscreener turned out to be a shrewd move. Their marriages had ended at the same time and they started dating. “I found somebody who’s a gem and we just connected,” says Duane.

In turns, the two tell the story of the first art they made together: a pair of cardboard Halloween masks to wear around Old Town. A woman offered to buy them for $75 each and they took her up on it, handing them over after the festivities. “We had a year’s worth of making art together before we started to date,” says Micki, who joined in the now Kinetic Grand Championship fun in 1982. “It just became this natural outgrowth of what we did.” 

Their artistic partnership is mostly parallel. “His world was out in the shop in the garage and he’ll be out there until 2 in the morning,” she says, while she works in her studio. But they visit each other’s spaces and share their work when it’s ready. “Sometimes we make a comment, sometimes we know better than to make a comment,” she says laughing.

It was while Flatmo was making monthly posters for the former Old Town Bar and Grill promoting shows by musical acts like Robert Cray coming through town that he came to his angular cubist style. His “Three Fools” poster, with its playful, asymmetrical figures, won Best in Show at the Cultural Center, where it was chosen by the curator of the Oakland Art Museum. “And I know everyone was looking at it like, ‘How the fuck did this cartoon win Best in Show?’” he says, laughing. 

Flatmo says he doesn’t begin with a message, an abstract idea or a problem to solve. Often the process begins with imagination and play. “I know how to put colors against each other,” he says. “I know how to do contrast and composition.” The play comes in the distortions and little twists, making an alley cat a little scruffier, a little weirder. “I wouldn’t want to draw a normal barrel. Why have an arm how it’s supposed to be? … I do stuff that I hope is cool lookin’. And I hope other people feel that way.”

It sounds casual but the work is exacting. His airbrush pieces require cutting an overwhelming number of shapes from a drawing to form stencils to apply to the canvas and paint, sometimes in tiny sections. For someone who admits he’s too impatient to finish books, it seems incongruous to make a puzzle of a painting. “But when I’m done, I know.”

Amid a period of making bright, colorful paintings, Flatmo’s father died. “My dad taught me so much — such a good person,” he says, stopping to catch his breath. “I started doing all this muted stuff. … and I never did this style before,” he says, gesturing to “The Accountant,” a portrait on the wall beside him, and describing how he held cardboard shapes to the canvas and airbrushed along their edges to produce curves and corners. “I did it upstairs in our apartment and I wouldn’t let Micki in until I was finished.” After his father’s death, he was “seeing things a different way … feeling things darker. He was 66 when he passed. He was a smoker and fumes from painting,” he says, were too much for the flimsy paper masks painters used. Flatmo put a $20,000 price on the piece so nobody would buy it.

A photo of Flatmo’s parents is taped to the shelf above the desk in his small, packed studio. Pulling out flat file drawers of his work on paper, he’s as excited to produce a flattened Humboldt Brewing Co. Red Nectar six-pack caddy as an issue of Newsweek featuring his work. There are Foxfarm plastic bags, early pen and ink work, labels for Downtown Brown beer, pencil sketches and photographs, all of them pulling him into memories of their creation. 

There’s a study for a favorite painting, “Buenos Tiempos en Chacala,” depicting roving musicians and a Chihuahua he and Micki saw on the beach in Mexico. “Everything fits right,” he says, down to the “kisses” where one shape touches another. 

One drawer is filled with Lost Coast Brewery coasters on the backs of which he drew caricatures, political cartoons, drunks and dick jokes. Sometimes, Flatmo says, he’d sketch someone and pass the coaster to his table mates, challenging them to find the subject in the room. One drawing shows a sealed coffin drifting at sea with oars dangling from its sides. “That’s’ kind of what I think death is like. You can’t really row those oars anymore, you know, you’re going and going, and then,” he shrugs.

The macabre is usually more gleefully gruesome in Flatmo’s hands. “I love gross, gory stuff,” he says, noting he’s always enjoyed creating sculptures for the Kinetic Lab of Horrors and watching people freak out at his lurid inventions with bulging eyes, oozing guts and knocked around teeth. “I do things a lot that I might be embarrassed if people knew that I did it.”  

Flatmo is almost always working on something, in the shop, building, painting or drawing. Not creating something makes him feel a little off and unfinished projects loom on his to-do list, like the children’s book he started 25 years ago about a turtle trying to decorate his dull shell. He even made a few of the sketches in the studio during a recent hospital stay. 

For more than a decade, he’s dealt with liver illness and a transplant, most recently a cancerous tumor for which treatment may have run its course. Flatmo is reluctant to dwell on it and has kept the issue to himself, not wanting people to treat him differently or imagine him languishing when he’s feeling good and enjoying life. “I want my hope to still be there,” he says, raising a finger and reciting a favorite adage, “Happiness is not being smart enough to know what to worry about.” 

Flatmo’s first kinetic racing sculpture Pencil Head “was a piece of shit. It had only one gear.” He’d been an avid spectator and got to know race founder Hobart Brown. “That got me into sculpture, that really did it,” he says, and soon he was raiding Arcata Salvage, trading art for scavenging privileges to make wild rolling pieces like Tin Pan Dragon, the silver steed from the 2008 Kinetic Grand Championship that now resides in the Smithsonian American Art Museum. 

Sometimes a pun is enough to set him off on a build, like Artistic License, which he covered with old license plates. “I usually draw it with what I’m going to build in mind,” Flatmo says, balancing the practical considerations with imagination. “The idea is the start. A lot of times I have a chassis of a machine and I just wanna build on it.”

Some of the sculptures have traveled around the country, most notably to Burning Man, where Flatmo’s contraptions have become icons of the Playa, none more cultishly beloved than El Pulpo Magnifico, successor to his El Pulpo Mecanico. Micki has been adding her talents to the project by making wearable art costumes for the El Pulpo team as well. Last year was the Flatmos’ 18th and final trip to the festival, but they still find themselves noting ideas for the next one out of habit.

Flatmo has sold El Pulpo to local friends and collaborators Andrew Goff and Will Startare, though Flatmo retains the intellectual property. “It’s a bitch to go out there and put it up and take it apart,” says Flatmo. He says he guesses he could “sell it to some rich guy who’s gonna take it to Burning Man and party with his friends. But this is like passing a torch.” 

Duane Flatmo Alley is gratifying, too, surrounded as it is by the Arkley Center, “Inharmonious” and “Busy Dogs – No Barking Any Time” murals. “I’m glad it happened in that alley because … it started there with the dogs and cats,” he says. “It’s weird seeing my name up there but it’s also touching.” 

Bringing out El Pulpo is bound to get Flatmo the “wow” he enjoys and the gaping wonder he loves to see. It’s overwhelming, with its flames, popping eyes and robotic tentacles. But it’s born of the same trickster joy with which Flatmo will make a coin appear and disappear for a child on the sidewalk, or slide a coaster sketch to watch someone register the likeness or the joke. 

Whether he’s showing a sketch or burst of fire, he says, “I want them to say, ‘Wow, look at that — look what Duane did.’”

Jennifer Fumiko Cahill (she/her) is the managing editor at the Journal. Reach her at (707) 442-1400 ext. 106 or jennifer@northcoastjournal.com. Follow her on Bluesky and Instagram @JFumikoCahill.

This article appears in Duane Flatmo Wants to Wow.