During the 20 years that Malcolm Furlow flirted with the idea of art as a career, he amassed a resume worthy of the New York Times best seller list, assuming it was fleshed out a bit with his Texas-style flourishes and embellishments. But his career detours always led back to art.

Furlow, who's got a new studio on-site in  Michael McCormick Gallery,  attended the University of Texas on an athletic scholarship; but after a leg injury, he switched to the art department, lured by rumors of classes with live nude models. He spent 18 years as a musician, proficient on everything from guitar to piano to sax, playing back-up for Lou Rawls, the Beach Boys, and whatever other bands passed through the Las Vegas Hilton, and traveling with Reba MacIntire. Between gigs, he did photo-journalism and fashion photography worldwide. But that musician thing: while Reba traveled by plane, the rest of the crew went by bus. That meant long absences from family, and bus trips nightmarish by definition, and even worse when personality conflicts developed. Furlow reckons bus tours are the reason so many musicians turn to drugs. And that fashion thing: models showing up with their hair all blown to hell three hours late for a photo shoot in, say, Italy; three hours during which Furlow had to wait around, not getting paid. Don?t get him started on prima donnas.

Interwoven was a stint at Disney, which had turned color "how it affects us emotionally" into a science, and you can see what Malcolm learned in his luminous, multi-hued paintings. His lifelong hobby, creating 3D topography (e.g., for train sets), made him valuable to Disney, where he developed innovations that saved the corporation millions. Once, he broke a radio and noticed a rubber sheathing material that retained the shape of the components it encased. He ordered barrels of the stuff, painted real-life cliffs with it, and peeled off an exact replica. The technique reduced to three the former hordes needed to create sets for Disney movies and amusement park rides. Furlow's dioramas appear in Disney movies such as 'Bladerunner' and 'Track 39'. But that corporate thing: like everyone else at his level Malcolm was earning peanuts, despite all his money-saving innovations, and he got laid off like an actor every time a project was done. He had a yen to shake the corporate monkey off his back and see what he could accomplish solo.

He went into business for himself, specializing in model railroads, 'because basically what I saw was a bunch of old, rich guys who liked to play with trains.' His life-size dioramas showed up at F.A.O. Schwartz, the Nuremberg Toy Fair, and the Neiman Marcus Museum. Terminally ill children at the Dallas Children's Hospital play in the canyons of his 35x70-foot diorama, 'Trainscape,' while trains run overhead. But that entrepreneur thing: traveling constantly with a work crew and contending with corporate clients 'demands' although Sharon, his wife of 33 years, did a dynamite job of running interference, expertly handling the roles of chief business manager and PR person.

All the detours led back to art. In 1987, he did a 5x6-foot painting of the San Francisco de Asis Church in Ranchos, working off a picture. He'?d never seen the real thing and had no idea it had also inspired Georgia O'Keeffe, Ansel Adams, and others. He approached a Dallas gallery director, Linda Horn, who said she wasn?t accepting new artists. Furlow camped outside her office and was told she was in a meeting. Horn came around, however. 'I don't think she'd ever seen Ranchos Church done in cadmium,' he said. She gave him a one-man show and he produced 30 paintings at night, ran his modeling company by day, and averaged four hours of sleep. Two-hundred people were waiting when he pulled up to the gallery with his paintings and the show sold out in 10 minutes. He asked Horn if this happened to other artists. She said no, and eventually sent him to Santa Fe, a larger market. Although it?s been reported that all of his shows have sold out, in truth he?s had 56 sold-out shows' out of probably a hundred.

At his 750-acre cattle ranch in the Tres Piedras area, Malcolm knows the land down to where that special pi?on is. The solitary life suits him ? no buts. His acrylic paintings, inspired by southwestern life, vibrate with a numinous quality like images from a dream or vision, desolate and beautiful. 'Wolves at the Diner' (acrylics) suggests the uneasy coexistence of the natural and man-made worlds, as a pack of wolves swarms in front of a shuttered diner with a border of struggling hollyhocks, flanked by a spindly tree. One of the wolves howls in the foreground. In the expressionistic serigraph ?Rio and the Indians,? a man stands in profile wearing full Plains Indian regalia, so taut that his body flexes like a bow. A dog lies at his feet and three men crouch behind him, also dressed ceremonially. Their impassive faces are astonishing juxtapositions of colored planes, like African masks. The bear in 'San Juan Grizzly' pulsates with vibrant squiggles, electric; the acrylics applied with such a light hand they're like pastels.

Malcolm is working on a new series, 'Highway 64,' inspired by 'some bizarre things' he's encountered on the road to Tres Piedras: the coyote that wouldn?t move even when he walked up to it; the guy with his arms uplifted who said he?d been abducted by aliens; the golden lights flickering like fireflies in the distance that proved to be the eyes of an elk herd lying in the road. Watch him capture the mysteries on canvas at his new studio in Michael McCormick Gallery, 106 Paseo del Pueblo Norte.