In a world where ‘bigger is better’ has become more commonplace than ‘less is more’, surf artist Matt Dresser is throwing all the rules out the window and redefining what is cool. Dresser is an artist from New Smyrna Beach, Florida whose life has been centered around surfing and skateboarding since he was seven years old. There’s an old saying that goes something like, ’Some must live the life of which others can only dream…’ and whether he really knew it or not, Dresser has been living that life for most of his existence.
“I don’t know what is cool according to social standards,” Dresser said, “but I love what I’m doing and from the response of a lot of people, I guess it is pretty cool!” So, what is it that Matt Dresser is ‘doing’? Well, we’ll get to that in due time, but first let’s explore the journey that has taken him to where he is today.
At the age of seven Matt wanted to do what his older brother was allowed to do and growing up minutes away from one of the best surf breaks in the State of Florida, New Smyrna Inlet, his brother was surfing almost every day, no matter what the season or time of year. To hear Dresser recall his interest in surfing, “I remember my brother had what I think was the first Surfer Magazine and Nat Young had just won the 1968 World Championship and I was into it!” As clear as he can recall, on the back cover of that issue was an ad that featured a collection of miniature surfboards, one of which had a British flag design and Matt just thought that was cool.
At eight years old Matt would tag along to the beach and ride his cousin’s board whenever he got the chance. And a love of the water, a love of the beach and a love of surfing was born. It wasn’t until Dresser was twelve before he got his first surfboard of his own, and like so many of us before (and after) him, it was a hand me down from one of the surf kids that made up the group of friends that Matt tagged along with to the beach. “I don’t remember exactly what my first board was or how exactly it came to be my very own board,” Matt said, “but I’ll never forget the feeling, how stoked I was to have my own board, and that I knew I could paddle out as soon as I got to the beach, that I could come in and take a break and not have to relinquish the board I was riding back to its owner. It was like a rite of passage for me, like I’m sure it must be for any kid getting his first board.”
Surfing was all that mattered for a long time and getting to surf a break like New Smyrna meant that Matt would be in the water with some of the biggest names in surfing, and not just the biggest names in Florida surfing, but in surfing period. Guys like Charlie Baldwin, Bernie Crouch and Matt Kechele were regulars at New Smyrna Beach, and for those who don’t know, the inlet there produces one of the best, most consistent waves on the East Coast. The rock ledges close to the coast in New Smyrna typically produce a fun, rideable wave almost every day of the year, and with water temperatures averaging 75 degrees year-round it’s truly a surfer’s paradise that produces some of the world’s best surfers.
Dresser surfed his way onto the junior high surf team and besides getting to surf contests against his schoolmates and guys from other schools during school hours, Matt recalled that, “We were allowed to wear baggies and tee shirts to school on the days we had contests and only the guys on the surf team had that privilege! Besides that, it was amazing that we had contests sometimes on school days, so we not only showed up to school in surf wear, but we also got to leave to go surf the contest!” A few years of surfing religiously and surfing other local and regional surf contests instilled in Dresser that universal feeling that surfers the world over adopt as nothing short of ‘a way of life.’ That feeling, that instinct which drives them to think of nothing else except the next great wave or the last killer session.
So, as awesome as surfing was in the early seventies, skateboarding was growing in popularity, and skateboarding was essentially nothing more than “sidewalk” surfing. Unbeknownst to all these young surfers, as they were beginning to ride skateboards, they were actually getting a jump on the skateboarding boom that no one knew was about to happen. “We started skateboarding on skinny decks with clay wheels,” Dresser recalled. “We had a few hills and a few driveways that were sort of like dropping in on a wave, but even just skating to the store or to a friend’s house we knew where every palm frond or tree branch hung over the sidewalk. Those were the spots where we could tuck down to go under it like getting barreled, so going in one direction those were lefts and going back they were rights, so we had Pipeline and Sunset and Waimea, Rocky Point or any other famous break we knew about from Surfer Magazine. It was all about getting in that tube as we zoomed back and forth from one place to another.”
The invention of the urethane wheel by Frank Nasworthy in the early seventies led to the skateboarding boom that was happening just as Dresser and his group of surfing buddies were starting to dig skateboarding as a way to simulate surfing when there weren’t any waves. Soon after that, skateboard parks started popping up and as crazy as it sounds the first skateboard park to open in the United States, Skatboard City (pronounced skateboard city), in Port Orange, Florida was just a mile or two from where Matt lived. It didn’t take long for Matt to excel at skateboarding and when the skatepark asked him to be on their skateboard team, surfing quickly took a backseat and Dresser began to focus his life on skating. It was no surprise that some of the best skateboarders were going to emerge from Florida, and once again Matt found himself being influenced by some of those skaters. Guys like Kelly Lynn and Clyde Rogers were regulars at Skatboard City and before long Matt and Kelly were best friends, traveling around to other skateparks to compete in contests all over the state. Lynn recalled meeting Matt at Skatboard City, “Matt was older than me, but we were skating together every day and became good friends.” Matt’s mom would drive the kids to events as far away as Tampa, Cocoa and Jacksonville and get a motel room, drop them off for the weekend then return to pick them up when the contest was over. Matt knew he had it good! His mom was super cool, and Kelly’s mom would look Matt in the eye and demand he take good care of Kelly. Fortunately for everybody, Matt always stayed true to his word and not only brought everyone home safely but brought home more than a fair share of trophies too.
With Skateboarder Magazine showing the world what Dogtown and the Z Boys were doing, vertical skating became all the rage. To think it took an almost empty pool and a handful of kids from Santa Monica to start a wave of interest in skateboarding that spread around the world like a gasoline fire is a phenomenon. The first skateparks that had opened were a little ahead of their time in reference to skating vertical but that didn’t stop anyone anywhere from putting plywood up to create more wall space, vertical terrain and higher tops to fly out of. Lynn remembered a pool in New Smyrna that became skateable, “We found a pool near our house and me and Matt used to skate it every day. We put a plywood extension in the pocket and had some great sessions where we were pushing each other all the time. I have some 8mm footage from that and some great pics. There’s one with Matt in the background cheering me on and I’m halfway up the extension with an Alva headband on, that’s a total classic!” Kona Skatepark had opened in Jacksonville and didn’t have any vertical terrain at all so they added a six-foot concrete extension to a ten-foot-deep bowl and that was just proof that everyone needed vertical any way they could get it.
With skateboarding’s popularity growing and Matt Dresser and his friends from New Smyrna beginning to skate as good as anyone in Skateboarder magazine it was no wonder that surfing had taken a back seat to skating. In time though, Dresser got older and as with us all there were bills to pay and Matt found an income back in the surfing industry, so once again a shift in focus occurred that led Matt back to the beach and back to the water and the waves. Dresser had a natural talent for art and with the surfboard industry booming he landed a job airbrushing surfboards in Central Florida. At first Matt got hired to airbrush for Charlie Baldwin in New Smyrna. Having grown up in the water at the inlet, Dresser made a name for himself but having an older brother who was already a friend of Charlie’s sure didn’t hurt. When word got out what Dresser was doing at Charlie Baldwin’s factory, other shapers who needed airbrush work had Matt come in on off days and soon he was doing everybody’s boards from Daytona to Melbourne. CBs, Quiet Flight, Natural Art, Rainbow and others. By 1989 Matt had moved to Melbourne to be nearer the factories. “I was airbrushing like a hundred boards a week in ‘89. I would hit the Natural Art factory one day and do twenty boards then hit the Rainbow factory the next day and do twenty more, then on to Quiet Flight the next day for twenty of theirs and so on and so on. It was crazy!” Dresser laughed as he recalled the memories.
One of those factories was Clay Lyle’s, who had the Town & Country label, and eventually Matt was hanging out at the T&C factory most of the time. Lyles had been a teammate of Matt’s on the Skatboard City skateboard team and was glassing for Baldwin when Dresser first got started airbrushing years earlier, so they had surf skate brotherhood history from way back. “I have to admit, growing up in the surf skate industry in those days was pretty fun,” Dresser said. “I mean, Craig Sugihara from T&C would come to town and take us all to dinner and hang out, and if the waves were good, we’d just close the shop and go paddle out and session our asses off or whatever. Yeah, life was good!” As life is known for throwing curve balls, it came as no surprise when one day the arcade park across from the factory added a half pipe and just like that, Matt was in the pro shop setting himself up a new skate. It had been four years since he had really skated hard and now, he had the best of both worlds at his fingertips. That whole experience lasted around ten years, ten very formative years, and for a while Dresser was living in a downstairs condo on the ocean that offered a killer break right out front. Dresser is very humble and downplays any lavish lifestyle which makes his story all the better. He was one of those guys with natural talent who loved what he did and landed in the right place at the right time. It’s pretty much what every kid who surfs dreams of after realizing they’re not going to win the world title… Of course it wasn’t without its hardships too. In the mid-nineties China started flooding the surfboard market with essentially what were “pop-outs”, and it got harder and harder to make a living in the surfboard industry. At one point Matt was doing twelve-dollar sprays and it took two, sometimes even three times more boards to maintain a decent income. “I had been doing it for just over ten years, and honestly, I got a little burned out,” he admitted.
Not exactly out of work but wondering what lies next presented life with the opportunity to wind up with that proverbial curve ball again, and Matt did what he always did, he knocked it out of the park! His girlfriend at the time basically had a corporate career with Bell South and one of the perks of her job was NASCAR credentials. During an outing to the Daytona 500, Matt and Erin arrived early on Sunday and were surprised to find there was nothing to do around the track, and a light bulb popped on over Matt’s head with a darn good idea. Matt thought offering slot car track racing to the public at the race tracks each week would be a great way to provide the fans with something to fill their time, and NASCAR agreed. Matt and Erin went out and bought the equipment, a trailer and a motor home and pulled up to the next Daytona 500 in style and with a new business in tow. The Fireball Speedway was well received and gave fans a cool, exciting, interactive experience, and NASCAR was thrilled. “We brought an eight-lane track and offered twenty-five lap sessions for that first race,” Dresser said. “NASCAR asked us to keep doing it and they gave us seventeen races that first year.”
The following year NASCAR licensed them for thirty-three races and the fans just ate it up every week. Traveling from city to city with NASCAR wasn’t exactly a lonely road though. Every week big rigs from quite a few industries packed out from track to track, week after week traveling the road for months on end. Apparel, food, entertainment, race car haulers and motor homes all traveled that circuit and road grime often covered virtually every vehicle by the time they pulled into the next track to set up for the week. Firstly, it looks terrible to be conducting business out of super dirty setups but secondly, and just as importantly, NASCAR is committed to providing a clean, safe environment throughout their facilities and events so every week a power washing crew was responsible for cleaning almost every vehicle licensed by NASCAR to do business with their fans. As fate would have it, that business closed shop, leaving NASCAR scrambling to live up to their reputation and Matt suggested that since he was already there at every race and was familiar with exactly what needed to be done, and how to do it, that he put a team together to replace the old crew, and lo and behold, guess who acquired the cleaning responsibilities? Yep, Matt and Erin! They operated under the same name as their slots business and doubled their income. Amazingly enough, this lasted for a total of twenty-two years and has now allowed Matt to slow down in life and stop and smell the horses. Well okay, and the roses too.
Wait a minute. Did that say stop and smell the horses? It sure did. Erin had ridden horses all her life and owned a horse she kept stabled near their home in Cocoa. So, when Matt left the NASCAR gig and came home for good, when Erin would go riding, Matt would go skateboarding, and fortunately, this made momma happy (You know what they say that when momma ain’t happy, nobody happy, right?). Well, as time went by Erin bought a second horse and she suggested Matt go riding with her more. Matt was down, in fact, seeing Erin jumping horses, getting into it, Matt piped up that he wanted to jump too. “Yeah, right,” Erin pretty much said. But Matt was a surfer/skater/NASCAR guy, and in my humble opinion that spells adrenaline junkie all day long. So when Erin figured let him do what he wants to do, Matt found out that the rush you get when you pull into a double overhead barrel or ollie over the hip in a perfect kidney pool, or even watch thirty-eight stock cars pass you at two hundred miles per hour an inch apart from each other, wasn’t all that much different from the rush you get jumping a horse over some oxers or triple bars. Matt Dresser was stoked, and in her defense, Erin was stoked too! And now that they had two horses being stabled a few miles from their home, the expense of boarding two horses and paying the mortgage on an oceanfront home was considerable enough to convince Matt to sell the house and find a piece of land big enough to board their horses themselves, and that’s just what they did.
The surf kid from New Smyrna, the skater and road warrior, found a ten-acre farm for sale, sold the house, packed up the horses, and said goodbye to the beach. It was the exact opposite of The Beverly Hillbillies. The laid-back beach boy and the chic wife were leaving the surfer dude life behind and settling down. Or were they? Moving to the country and leaving the beach didn’t really bother Matt, especially since he figured he could build a halfpipe in the barn and spend what time was necessary doing his farm chores then going skating every day. Going skating like 20 feet from where his chores were performed! (This IS Matt Dresser after all isn’t it?)
Now you might remember, at the beginning something was mentioned about ‘what is Matt doing now that is so cool?’ and that we’d get to that in due time? Well, it’s time… But first remember that Matt is an amazing artist too. Matt vividly remembered the back cover of his brother’s Surfer Magazine, the one with the ad for the miniature surfboard collection in it. And working with slot cars, scaled down versions of NASCAR Cup cars for so many years turned Matt’s creative focus towards making scaled down surfboards and eventually scaled down skateboards, and THAT is where this story gets even better.
Years prior, when he was airbrushing surfboards, Matt collected some foam scraps in the Quiet Flight factory one day and cut some mini surfboard templates and made some miniature surfboards to give away as Christmas presents. His attention to detail was unbending as he glued together pieces of foam, shaped his 1/8th scale boards, glassed, sanded and finished them and looked upon his work and saw that it was good. Now, with time on his hands, Dresser decided to make some miniatures and that attention to detail that was just mentioned, well, his miniature surfboards and skateboards aren’t just sized to scale. They are made to factory standards that duplicate identically to the boards he copies.
The Hansen 50/50 was a classic longboard and one of Matt’s replicas mimic exactly the famous boards from all the manufacturers that he duplicates.
Dresser has not only done an amazing job at making perfect replicas but just as amazing has been his ability to present them to the world on social media. It’s not just posting ordinary photos of ordinary little bitty skateboards and surfboards either.
Matt Dresser has duplicated the surfboard that Cheyne Horan won the 1985 OP Pro on.
The surfboard that now hangs in the International Surfing Museum in Huntington Beach, California right next to Matt’s framed replica of that same board. And now Dresser is duplicating skateboards from famous photographs in skateboard magazines to exact perfection including all the graphics on these boards.
Add that he will frame the photograph in a box frame, then place the miniature inside the frame and you have some serious collectors’ items that hold very special sentiments to the guys who are featured in the photos, both current and old school.
Whether he is aware of it or not, Matt Dresser is one of the lucky few who actually has lived the life of which others may only dream. Fortunately for all of us who know him, we don’t think he even realizes it. He is as humble today as he was when he was a stoked out little kid who got to tag along with his brother to the beach and ride any surfboard that was available for him to paddle out on. For now all he knows is that his four horses and one donkey are relying on him to keep them safe, he will continue to skateboard as long as possible and because he knows the consequences he will make sure momma stays happy. If his life’s journey so far is any indication of what is yet to come, he will surely have more to tell before it’s all said and done.
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Mike is a native First Coaster and was a leading figure in surfing and skateboarding for most of his life. After promoting music for many years on the local music scene, Mike now brings a unique perspective to FirstCoast.Life as a contributing writer.
2 Responses
Fantastic story. Matt is so multi talented and dedicated to everything he does. I’m totally stoked by the article you wrote. Great Job Mike Bravo Zulu🤙🏄🛹
Thank you Chuck! He is amazing that’s for sure! I hope you’re well!