Burning Desire : Robert Deatherage has a passion for painting flames that lick up the sides of hot rods and Harleys. Now the Newport Beach resident is hooked on marlin.

For fifteen years, Robert Deatherage was a hairstylist. He graduated from Vidal Sassoon’s San Francisco academy and worked in his Beverly Hills and South Coast Plaza salons and other hair emporiums. The whole time, women entrusted their hair to him, little suspecting that sometimes, while his hands moved through their locks, he was thinking of flames : Great bursting flames, colorful flames, flicking and twisting over the surface of things.

Fortunately, Deatherage isn’t out to create the tonsorial version of “Backdraft.” He just loves the looks of ‘50s hot rod paint jobs, which often were enhanced with flame designs.

The 40-year-old Newport Beach resident’s flair for flames started when he was a child growing up in Garden Grove. “Like other kids I played sports, but I wasn’t very serious about it. I’d be building model cars, entering model car contests, constructing balsa wood airplanes with motors. And I always painted flames on them,” he said.

“Some of the car models came with flame decals, but they didn’t seem very good. So when I was just beginning I’d put the decal on, trace around it, take it off and then paint it on with several small paint brushes and different colors. By the time I was 10 I was doing my friends’ bicycles and skateboards with spray cans in the garage.”

We were seated in the front office of his work studio in an industrial section of Costa Mesa. The seating choices were a cheap plastic table with a broken leg or the floor. The ‘50s steel desk that’s usually there was absent, in the process of being painted candy-apple red. In its place was a customized ’51 Harley Panhead with a Deatherage finish and flame job, currently the property of Mickey Rourke.

Deatherage has be-flamed a wide variety of items, from Rourke and fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli’s Harleys (including those used in the Rourke film “Wild Orchid”), to a guitar for Jon Bon Jovi, to the towel dispenser in his studio’s restroom. He’s flamed a guitar-headed mannequin torso he made (now owned by one of the Black Crowes) and a ‘50s refrigerator. His chief calling card, though, is the work pictured on his actual calling card, a postcard-sized photo of a 10-foot fiberglass marlin trophy customized with a deep blue car finish and a sunburst of yellow and orange flames that sweep back from its head.

“I figured if I just wrote ‘Flamed Marlin’ on a normal business card people would think, ‘What?’ ” Deatherage explained.

It’s an arresting sight, this fiery fish, and it’s moved Deatherage’s life into second gear, he says. Where his flame jobs were once “a lark” and part-time vocation, it’s now his living. He’s sold about 25 of the fish so far--he generally makes $2,500 a fish, though retailers can double that amount--and he’s taking on more work and initiating more projects than he quite knows what to do with.

That wasn’t the case when he left his secure hairstyling job last year.

“It really was a hard decision to make, but it’s something I felt I should be doing,” Deatherage said. “I’m not married and don’t have children or a lot of responsibilities right now and thought maybe I’d never get another chance to do this. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I only knew I didn’t want to have a boss and wanted to do my own thing. I wanted a studio where I could express and experiment.”

One of Deatherage’s Marlins is going in over the entrance way of the Hard Rock Cafe in Newport Beach, and they’re talking about putting them in some of the other Hard Rock locations. According to Hard Rock curator John Rosenfield: “I think they’re such incredible things, with a classic quality. The effort and detail Robert puts into things is incredible. I think he’s a very talented new artist and that he’s going to do something major someday.”

It may not be the thing that puts him in museums, but one of Deatherage’s new projects is a “pool shark,” a mold of a 15-foot hammerhead shark that he’s going to paint and then mount fluorescent lights in its underbelly, with the intent of using it for pool table lighting. His chief interest for the future is designing furniture with a custom-car-meets-George-Jetson look, including some with an exploded car-wreck appearance.

“I love restoring cars and motorcycles and doing the flame jobs on them, but that’s been done. I wanted to take it somewhere new. I’ve just been looking for where that was,” Deatherage said.

There was a bit of serendipity involved in his deciding to flame fish.

“A friend of mine had caught this fish in Kona and had a taxidermist cast it and mail it to his home. His wife couldn’t stand it, having this traditional fish-colored fish in the house. So it hung in his garage for a couple of years. I rode to his house for a barbecue three years ago and put my motorcycle in the garage. I’d flamed my motorcycle and as I walked back into the garage to show the guys this new Harley I’d just built, I noticed the fish above it, and they were both going in the same direction.

“The shape of the gas tank was large in the front and smaller toward the rear, like the fish. So I had this idea and asked him if I could have the fish. He said, yeah, please take it. I took it to a friend’s shop and over several weekends I painted it. I did it just for me. But several of my friends came over and they had a bidding war over it, so I thought maybe I should make more.”

His work is painstaking and labor-intensive, with a flamed paint job being applied in some 30 to 35 layers of paint, taking dozens of hours to apply, spread out over weeks of drying time. He does his flame designs by hand, generally in a one-of-a-kind design, though he does use a template to repeat his perfected design for the marlins. Deatherage was careful to point out that he works on fiberglass molds, not actual fish. “I’m not destroying fish to do my art projects,” he said.

While Deatherage is looking to take his art down new avenues, he acknowledges that it is based on a nostalgia for the ‘50s and early ‘60s California culture.

He said: “There were the boomerang shapes, the whole jet age thing--I think that’s when America was at its strong point, before everything got milked out. It was the last real style statement. In the ‘70s and ‘80s we were kind of lost. Things from the ‘50s are big now because people my age and older remember them--the cars, fenders, flames and special paint, the love of the automobile. Now that they’re old enough to appreciate it, they also have the money to do something about it.”