Malcolm Furlow (1946-2023) American, Native American Giclee. Signed lower left. Numbered 36/50 on back. Title on back: "Comanche Rider II." Dated '91 on back. Depicts a colorful scene of a horse rider with weapon drawn. 

Size: 50 x 36 1/4 in. 

#2379 #9 . 

Malcolm Furlow was born in 1946 in Louisiana. His father was half Choctaw, and his grandfather had been taken from a reservation as a boy to a Christian school, where his braids were cut off and he was beaten frequently for speaking his traditional language. As a small child, Malcolm recalled seeing a Native American being hung by a mob in his neighborhood. That night the family moved to Dallas, Texas for safety, and he was instructed by his father to never mention his heritage, nor did he ever meet his Choctaw relatives. While traveling across New Mexico with his father at the age of six he became fascinated with the landscape, and asked him for paint and brushes, switching to acrylics soon after to capture the colors he preferred. By the time he graduated high school he was creating enormous canvases of landscapes and abstract figures, but while attending the University of Texas on a track-and-field scholarship his art professor disapproved of his style, and he dropped out of college to focus on music instead. In 1964 he joined a band called Johnny G and the G-Men, playing saxophone and bass guitar, both of which he taught himself to play. For the next eighteen years he bounced around the Pacific Coast and the Southwest, getting married at least twice (and divorced at least twice), interacting with the mafia in Las Vegas, and playing backup for people like Lou Rawls and the Beach Boys. After an accident in Burbank on a motorcycle in 1982 left him stranded with broken instruments, he answered a newspaper solicitation from Disney Studios and met John Olson, a lead Imagineer who hired him to help craft sets and models for films. Olson also introduced Furlow to model trains, which became his primary focus for the next decade, traveling all over the world to set up large-scale tracks for movies, museums, and private collections. While experimenting with photography in 1987 he suffered a near death experience that invoked a spiritual awakening and eventually led him to return to painting, setting up a permanent studio in Taos, New Mexico. By the 2000s he was internationally recognized for his vibrant, colorful, Wild West-themed works, naming Fritz Scholder, Andy Warhol, and Peter Max as the most important influences on his style. He obtained a Silver award from the Sorbonne and the coveted Gold award from the Luxembourg Museum in Paris, with his pieces in museum collections in Sweden, Japan, and throughout the United States. A documentary on his life in 2019 referred to him as “a Renaissance Man: the quintessential cowboy, musician, and intellectual artist.” Tragically, this living legend was sickened early in the pandemic and withdrew from public life, passing away in March 2023 from the effects of long COVID.