Coombstock - Coombaya The Hippie Store

First I’ll tell you that I`m an old hippie. I did all the clichés of the 60`s. I lived in Haight Ashbury in San Francisco and lived in Southern California in the coastal towns’ beach scenes, even in a `59 Cadillac Hearse for a bit! I travelled around North America, hitchhiked through Europe and even worked on Kibbutz’s in Israel.

Throughout my life, I`ve always created art in different forms. But my favourite medium has always been T-Shirts, which I have been making for 40 years. Back then, you couldn’t get coloured T-Shirts, due to the Marlon Brando “white T-Shirt syndrome” craze. I was determined to change that and create my own coloured T-Shirt. So every week I would hop on a Greyhound bus from Ottawa to St. Lawrence Boulevard in Montreal just to pick up four dozen white Pakistani T-Shirts, at six dollars a dozen! That was a time when we all lived in co-ops. I had a big cauldron on the stove and every day I would mix a batch of different coloured Rit dye. Which meant that every day, my clothesline was an ever-changing rainbow in the backyard -much to the amusement of my immediate neighbours! And so began my evolving visual journey of T-Shirts.

Over the years I experimented with many different styles of printed shirts. When my wife and I moved to Vancouver Island in 1994, I took a hiatus from printing T-Shirts to creating folk art. This allowed me to rekindle the West Coast perspective within me and bring me back to my hippie roots. I revaluated what I was trying to convey with the images that I was producing. This set me off on a quest to create a T-Shirt that would portray the iconic nature of an idealized West Coast experience. My T-Shirt vision evolved into a portal where imagination and ideals blended into that warm fuzzy spot when life was simple and where sunshine and happiness abounded