Greg Furman
Entrepreneur - Painter - Photographer - Poet - Sculptor
About Gregory J. Furman
In the grand and mysterious scheme of our comings and goings, in the 100,000 years or so in which we’ve employed language, Painting and Language have always been intimately linked.
Think of the caves of Altamira and Lascaux where one theory has it that the earliest humans venturing deep within caves, their noise reverberating off the walls, generated sounds like their stampeding prey. To represent this sound and cast a good hunting spell, they drew buffalo, bison and deer. Thinking Visually and Speaking forever since intimately linked in the mind of man. Magically so.
Looking back, I see, that as a child of four, finger painting and sculpting in multi-colored modeling clay or edible smelling playdough was a form of ‘speaking’ and ‘playing god.’ Few experiences then and now equal the ecstasy of that pursuit. Add a deep and abiding passion for reading and writing to the mix and the artist/poet is born. Or, perhaps, was already born and I was just waking up to that fact.
To pay for college I worked three jobs – construction (member of the laborers’ union), pumping gas, selling clothes at Poppy’s. Their ads read, “Poppy made mommy stop knitting.” I somehow managed to graduate with honors with a double degree in English and philosophy. Enmeshed, for better or worse, in the idealistic coils of a classic liberal arts education. And, terrifyingly, completely and utterly clueless as to what to do with it.
So, I bought a brand new ugh!-red priced-right Volkswagen ($2,000), left my working-class home, not to return for a decade, embarked upon my own version of “On the Road.” For four months I traveled the blue highways, sleeping in a pup tent, frugally spending the savings I had earned working for Schiavone Construction on Newark Airport’s expansion at $11 an hour, time and half after eight hours and double that on weekends. Great money. Saved most of it.
On my own dime I saw America like the rich kids then and now see Europe on their parents’ dimes. Solo, seeing our vast and splendid America the beautiful: The Everglades, New Orleans, Chicago, the mighty Mississippi, the great plains, Mount Rushmore, Monument Valley, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, the Painted Desert… giddy with my own freedom.
Landed in Los Angeles near broke. Worked as journalist in Compton the year of the first riots. After a year moved to Toronto, got a job as a speech writer for the Minister of Education, quit flat out (government ‘work’ was like living a Kafka nightmare), drove taxi six nights a week twelve hours a shift for eleven months, living the life bohemian. In 1971 helped found federal and provincially funded avant-garde gallery A Space (still around today- aspacegallery.com), got sick of being a starving artist on government dole, got ‘religion’ and, eureka, a proper job as a speech writer for the chairman of Suncor – Sun Oil’s Canadian subsidiary, pioneer developer of the Athabasca Tar Sands. All the while writing and painting. And vowed never to depend on grants, endowments, academic sinecures, or galleries as my sole source of income. And to keep working and build a body of work free of the pressure of art politics come what may.
Since then I’ve built a body of work that, to the degree any artist is ever satisfied with his or her work (never!), for me seems to be moving in a good direction. Oddly enough, even the best and most celebrated, will tell you, the money, a good thing of course, is not what drives them.
And now, after more than 40 years as a painter, sculptor and poet, I have been fortunate to have had one-man shows of my work in Manhattan, San Francisco, Sao Paolo, Toronto, several galleries in the Hudson Valley and most recently Galerie 888 in Greenwich, Connecticut; cruised globally as artist in residence on Azamara’s (luxury cruise line of Royal Caribbean )The Azamara Journey; published 19 books of poetry, two catalogs of my paintings and sculptures – Faces, Selected Works 1980 – 2009 and Daemon Mouse, Ink. (satiric drawings and collages).
Escaping the corporate world in 1994, I had the smart luck to create my SOURCE of funding that pays for the cat food and my artistic adventures: The Luxury Marketing Council (luxurycouncil.com) which continues to be recognized globally as a driving force in the luxury arena. The Council has grown from 32 luxury brands in Manhattan into an enterprise of some 1,000 member luxury brands, 5,000 CEOs and top marketing executives, in more than 40 cities worldwide.
My definition of an expert is ‘one who knows how much more there is to know.’ Happily and humbly, my insights into luxury, the luxury marketplace, the luxury customer, and best marketing practices of luxury brands have been and continue to be widely quoted in a range of media including Luxury Daily, Jing Daily, New York Times, Media Post, Forbes, The Huffington Post, Departures, The Detroit News, Barrons, China Daily, Travel Daily News, Wall Street Journal, Fortune,
Forbes online, Ad Age, Ad Week, National Journal, CNBC, BrandWeek and US News, to name a few.
Throughout my career I have been a passionate advocate of the important and necessary 'marriage’ of business, academia, nonprofits and the arts. I created and taught for twelve years, as adjunct professor, the first credited course in America on luxury marketing at NYU Stern Graduate School of Business.
Highlights of my educational experience include studying “Strategic Marketing” at Harvard, “Managing Critical Resources” at the University of Virginia’s Colgate Darden School of Business, a double major B.S. in English literature and philosophy from St. Peter’s College, Jersey City, the privilege of getting to know Marshall McLuhan personally, studying and influenced by his work on media having attended many of his lectures when he taught at the University of Toronto.
I have been privileged to serve on the boards of directors of Taj Hotels Resorts and Palaces, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Nova South Eastern University, Nomi Network and North Carolina State’s MBA global brand management program. Have lectured at Fordham, Kent State, LIM, Columbia, FIT, Mercy College, European School of Economics, Skolkovo Business School (Moscow, Russia) and Ryerson and York University (Toronto). And, most fun of all, years ago, as part of the New York Stock Exchange’s corporate citizenship programs, taught ‘economics’ to eighth graders at Dr. Sun Yat Sen middle school.
Our two cats, (Squeaky and Tutu), my wife, Wanda, who has her own home styling business, and I divide our time between our homes in Manhattan, Clinton Corners New York in the Hudson Valley and Toronto Canada.