Frank Moore likes to tell the story of how I thought I couldn’t draw. Sitting around our living room one day, admiring all the LaBash art on the walls, Frank asked me, “When did you realize you could draw?” I looked around the room for a little while and pointed at one of the large, complex drawings and said, “I think it was after I finished that third big project for you.” He was shocked … It turned out my teaches in college had told me that I couldn’t draw. My boss at my first graphic design job used to tell me I couldn’t draw … and I bought into it. Frank, on the other hand, hearing that I was a graphic designer set me to work on various projects without even thinking about whether I could draw or not. He just assumed because I was a graphic designer, I must be able to draw!
So, when Frank lectured as a visiting artist at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, he plastered one side wall of the auditorium with my drawings and posters and told the story of how I thought I couldn’t draw to the packed house of students. At the end of it, he told them, “So quit art school! Don’t listen to anybody! Follow your own vision!”
I painted this one summer during college when I thought I couldn't draw...
Michael LaBash was born in Indiana but was raised in Sydney, Australia.
After high school, he returned to the U.S.A. and attended Indiana University. He graduated in 1981 with a B.A. in Fine Arts and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
After spending the summer doing a prized graphic design internship at the National Zoo in Washington D.C. he moved to San Francisco at the beginning of 1982.
He worked in the Bay Area either full-time or freelance as a graphic designer until 1993 when he started his own design company which he still operates at present.
Also, in the mid-1980s, he started a recording studio, Dancing Dog, in Emeryville and was the singer/songwrtier in the band Mr. Dog, which later became The Counting Crows ... but that's another story ...
While all this was going on (it started back in high school), LaBash was drawing like mad and has been published in zines throughout the world and in the small press and the underground.