Line dance

Sean Scully once told me about his early days as a plasterer’s mate. At the age of 17 he was helping a craftsman who would often accidentally drop a good deal of plaster on his youthful assistant’s head, especially after a midday break in the pub. Scully spent his own lunchtimes differently. He would roar on his scooter to the Tate Gallery, and spend the time staring at a single picture: ‘The Chair’ by Vincent van Gogh.

That picture is one of two reference points in Sea Star, his beautiful exhibition at the National Gallery. Scully pays homage to it in two groups of three paintings, entitled ‘Arles Abend Vincent’ and ‘Arles Abend Deep’. Neither looks much like a chair; the panels resemble, if anything, sections of a wall (if not a plastered one). Scully has, in fact, taken a series of photographs of dry stone walls on the island of Aran. The walls are like a puzzle — some stones vertical, some horizontal, wider or narrower.

The ‘Arles Abend’ paintings are similar, except that they are built out of rectangles of loosely brushed, sumptuously rich colour. That’s something perhaps he learned from those lunch breaks in front of Van Gogh. The physical presence of a paint-stroke is something that can’t be replaced, he told me, containing as it does ‘the thinking, the feeling and the making, all compressed into a single action: a kind of low-relief sculpture of what happened’.

The wide brush marks give visible energy to Scully’s works — sweeping this way and that, here more agitated, there calmer. This movement interacts with the colour-chord of each picture — ochres, dark crimsons and olive greens in the case of the ‘Arles Abend’ pictures.

Encountering a room of Scullys you might think: ‘Oh, a lot of stripes and squares’.