THERE’S nothing like painting what you’re familiar with,’’ says Margaret Olley. ``You can do all sorts of things with the ordinary.’’ She pauses to consider the alternatives. ``To go off and paint the Swiss mountains is a monumental task, best left to God!’’
     But though Olley, 76, mostly paints still-lifes and the interiors of her own house, her world is anything but limited. She is a knowledgeable benefactor, who has given to public galleries works by Arthur Boyd, Edgar Degas and Georgio Morandi, as well as early Indian sculptures and miniatures. The range and depth of her own art has also been recently discovered: last year, an acclaimed retrospective exhibition of her work, presented in Sydney, Brisbane and Newcastle, showed landscapes, nudes and self-portraits, as well as the interiors for which she is well-known.
     And Olley has always been an open-minded traveller, absorbing new cultures and the master painters like a sponge: ``I’m always trying to learn, (going) to the great sources,’’ she says. In May this year, she went to London to see a huge Bonnard retrospective; before that, there was Rembrandt in Australia, Vermeer in Europe, and Matisse in New York. She has excellent recall, describing in detail paintings and exhibitions she has seen up to forty years ago.
     As we speak, Olley talks constantly about the masters. It is partly a defense mechanism, a way of gently deflecting probing questions -- like most artists, Olley is reluctant to talk about the whys and wherefores of her own work. But she also loves these artists: they are her touchstones, her guiding angels. When, for example, she chooses to paint her favourite yellow room half a dozen times -- as in her current show at Brisbane’s Phillip Bacon Galleries -- somewhere at the back of her mind are works such as Picasso’s variations on the ``seated woman’’ theme, a series she saw in Paris and has never forgotten.
     Olley’s admirers include the suave showman, Barry Humphries, and Art Gallery of New South Wales director Edmund Capon. Humphries, serious for once, praises Olley’s ``understanding of colour and her unerring placement of objects’’. Capon, writing in the retrospective catalogue, describes her as a specialist of ``the intimate, the personal, even the prosaic ... Olley is a part of that tradition, from Vermeer in the seventeenth century to Morandi in the twentieth century ... which finds inspiration, beauty and a rich spirit of humanity in the most familar of subject matter.’’
     Yet ever since Olley came to general public notice, in the mid-1950s, with vivid canvases of New Guinea, her realistic and angst-free style has been out of step with modern art trends. Modern life per se, with its stresses and strains, does not interest Olley. While other artists have promoted conflict and dissonance, she has championed harmony. Where they sought to disrupt the status quo, she was content to propose a seductive world of pleasure.
     Being unfashionable, however, has never stopped Olley from being popular with private collectors -- to the contrary, her shows, like the current one, have often been complete sell-outs (some of her recent paintings were bought by collectors sight unseen, from descriptions over the phone). Nor did it mean that she has received bad reviews. But commercial success does not mean art establishment credibility: from the late ‘70s and through the ‘80s, she was often ignored by curators and critics anxious to catch the next big art wave from overseas.