He was a person who really knew how to enjoy every day," said Diana Conway, his partner of 28 years.

Conway noticed nothing out of the ordinary until she awoke Thursday morning. He'd had a heart attack sometime in the night, she said, maybe even in his sleep. Combs was medevacked to South Peninsula Hospital in Homer, where he never regained consciousness and died that evening. Combs was a big, buoyant, spirited man with long white hair, a matching beard and a fondness for Volkswagen vans. Art reviewer Jan Ingram once described him as looking like "a flower child who somehow managed to swallow a bear whole."

Combs was born in the rugged backwoods country of Hazard, Ky., on Aug. 11, 1919, to a seamstress and a moonshiner who worked this job and that. When Combs' parents divorced, he and his brother were abandoned in an orphanage where discipline and religion were applied with an iron fist. They didn't see or hear from either parent for five years.

"The only thing that saved me there was we had a matron in the boys' dormitory that read a lot, and she got me into reading," Combs said in a 2004 interview. "And that's all I did. I even joined the Boy Scouts because they had a library. When I read all the books in their library, I quit."

When his parents resurfaced, the boys bounced between the two. Beside reading, sports provided escape, especially basketball and football. Combs' athletic talent was his ticket out of the life he was born into. And even though the schools he went to didn't offer art classes, he drew and drew.

Combs was taking college classes and training to be a shipfitter when the attack came on Pearl Harbor. He signed on with the U.S. Navy in 1942 and served in a diving unit deployed to Italy, a place that seeped into his pores. He would often return to that country to visit museums, lead art tours, conduct classes and advance his own studies.

After the war, he studied art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, then at Temple University in Philadelphia. He received his master of fine arts degree from Temple's Tyler School of Art in 1952. Combs' first love was painting. But after taking a part-time job in the ceramics department and sinking his hands into clay, that was it.

Combs, his wife and their three young sons drove up the Alaska Highway in 1955 with a potter's wheel attached to the roof of the vehicle. He dabbled in janitorial work and fished commercially before finally landing a job as an art teacher with the Anchorage School District in 1956 -- the only art teacher, in fact, with the whole district to look after. All the while he pursued painting and sculpting and throwing pots.

He joined the faculty of Anchorage Community College in 1962 and spent the next several years inspiring a new generation of Alaska artists, building up the art department, conducting studies on the suitability of local clay and producing a substantial quantity of his own work.

The Alaska art scene was almost dominated by landscapes and the illustration style at the time. Combs injected fresh and sometimes startling elements of abstract, expressionist and impressionist approaches into his own work. At the same time he encouraged the talent and polished the technique of students drawn to more representational art.

Pottery was considered his special domain, and his classes had long waiting lists. He built some of the first kilns around. And he did some of the city's first public art. His best-known piece may be the frieze at the top of older parts of the Anchorage Museum. His large canvas titled "Migration" won a major national award in 1965 and toured the country.

Combs divorced in the late '70s. He then entered what he called the second phase of his life, the one with Diana Conway, a writer and "artist of the mind."

"In a nutshell, I am a very happy person because of her," he once said.

In 1979, irked by the administrative turmoil that accompanied the eventual absorption of the college by the University of Alaska Anchorage, he resigned his tenured professorship. It was a heavy and unhappy decision for him.

"After 25 years, no gold watch, not a word," he told the Daily News at the time.

He retreated to Halibut Cove, a scattering of cabins on the south side of Kachemak Bay, with no roads in or out. There he set up his kilns and studio and continued to work. His last show in Anchorage, a collection of his art, both past and present, was held at Alaska Pacific University in August 2007.

He stopped doing ceramics several years ago. But despite his age and declining health, Combs continued to paint.

"All he wanted to do was paint," Conway said. "He just liked pushing paint around, with his finger, with a brush, whatever he had. He was always coming in for lunch with paint all over him, all over his fingers, all over his clothes, all over my walls."

Bill Sabo, once his student, later his colleague, remembers the advice Combs gave him long ago.

"'Well, Bill,' " he said, 'if you want to be an artist, you have to work every day. If you come home drunk at 2 o'clock in the morning, you have to go to the studio and work for at least a couple of hours if you haven't done that yet today."

Four of Combs' paintings are part of a group show at Halibut Cove Experience Gallery that opened last night. He also had 20 paintings set aside for a potential show when he went to bed Wednesday night -- and never woke up.

This is a man who followed his own advice until the very end.

Combs is survived by Conway, his sons and daughters-in-law, Sam and Jayna and their daughter, Alexa, of Anchorage; Jonathon and Barbara and their daughters, Kelly and Allison, of Seattle; and son David and his daughter, Annalise, also of Seattle.

No services are planned, but Conway said his ashes would be buried in Halibut Cove.

Friends, fans and former students are invited to leave tributes, reminiscences and comments at adn.com/artsnob