Once, when artist George McCullough was in a restaurant and couldn’t scare up a pencil, he used his finger and some grease from his dinner plate to doodle on a placemat.

This recollection comes courtesy of his wife, Sue, who says her late husband “never quit working.”

“He was the most creative person I think I have ever known,” she says. “He kept you amused and amazed.”

When McCullough died six years ago, Fort Wayne lost more than it may have realized, his friend Joel Fremion says.

McCullough was Fort Wayne’s Vincent Van Gogh, Fremion says.

The young McCullough did bear a striking resemblance to a young Vincent Van Gogh (Van Gogh didn’t live long enough to become old Van Gogh), but what Fremion refers to is a shared philosophy.

“George never painted a picture thinking, ‘I want to sell to this picture,’ ” he says. “His whole life was a continuing process of discovery.

“He never got to the point where he said, ‘Oh here is my style, and I will do this for the rest of my life because I can sell this style.’ ”

McCullough’s work is the subject of a tribute show at Castle Gallery that opens with a reception at 6 p.m. Thursday. Castle Gallery is at 1202 W. Wayne St.

When McCullough and his wife moved to Fort Wayne from California in 1965, the Castle Gallery building was the home of the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, and the West Central neighborhood, Fremion says, was a beehive of bohemian artistic activity.

McCullough came to Fort Wayne to make stained glass, but he was eventually hired as a teacher at the Fort Wayne Art Institute, which was on West Berry Street before it was subsumed into IPFW.

“I can remember going into the school,” recalls former student Fremion, “and Russ (Oettel) would be sitting there at the director desk – little ornery Russ Oettel. He’d be drinking coffee that I think was spiked with something. It was an interesting time period.”

Fremion says most of the students lived in the neighborhood and congregated at Henry’s, which had more of a “Parisian café” feel back then, he says.

“There was a lot of intellectual thought being tossed around,” he says.

As a teacher, Fremion says, McCullough was “very easygoing, extremely laid back, kind of on the quiet side and very soft spoken.” McCullough was not a “technique teacher,” Fremion says.

“It wasn’t about painting this way or painting that way,” he says. “It was about having your head in the right place.”

Sue McCulloch says there was a “real family sort of thing” going on at the Fort Wayne Art Institute.

“Everybody knew each other and looked out for each other,” she says. “When it moved out to the campus, there wasn’t the camaraderie there had been.”

Sue still lives in the house near the Fort Wayne Water Filtration Plant that the couple bought in the mid-’60s, and she is still an avid weaver and quilt-maker. And she still owns the house across the street that the couple acquired in the ’80s for no better reason than Sue needed more room to make a really big quilt.

“Some people aren’t very practical,” she says.

The couple met in Montana in the early ’50s, and they reconnected in New York City in 1954. George lived on the Lower East Side at the time and Sue decided to pay him a visit while she was vacationing in the city with a girlfriend.

In his memoir “Camping Out,” George confesses that when he received a letter from Sue asking whether she could see him, he thought she was seeking repayment of $5 she had lent him. The couple were married not long thereafter.

At 89, Sue is sportive, no-nonsense and non-wistful.

While Sue was taking me on a tour of her backyard, a branch impeded our path and Sue bent it back so I could get by.

She said that when she was a girl, she and her fellow young equestrians would time the release of such branches so that the rider directly behind the branch-bender got thwapped.

Then she admitted, “I almost just did that to you.”

Sue showed me her husband’s freestanding studio, almost untouched since he died and packed with paintings (Fremion estimates that McCullough created 5,000 paintings in his lifetime).

She also showed me a smaller weaving studio, which she says George constructed almost entirely out of discarded rafts from the now-defunct Three Rivers Festival raft race.

Sue says she gets lonely sometimes these days, but otherwise she has no complaints.

“I take it as it comes,” she says. “I don’t have much choice.”

She says her health is pretty good.

“I am not falling apart any more than I always have,” she says.

Fremion says he misses seeing McCullough painting along the banks of one of Fort Wayne’s rivers, and Sue says her husband grew less particular about where he’d paint as he got older.

“When we were first married, he would carefully scout out a place,” she says. “But I think he got tired of carrying everything around. He would just plop and paint.”