Elizabeth Fortescue visited Pat Corrigan, the man who oils the creative wheels

PAT Corrigan swings open the door to his spacious, modern apartment and welcomes you to the "Darling Point museum".

PAT Corrigan swings open the door to his spacious, modern apartment and welcomes you to the "Darling Point museum".

Corrigan is spot on. It's a cornucopia in here. Paintings jostle with sculptures across every centimetre of shelf and wall space, competing robustly with views of Sydney Harbour which swim in through banks of glass veranda doors. Video art works are playing non-stop on two screens.

Many of the paintings are by indigenous artists, great explosions of colour which inspired the recently-released book, Power + Colour: New Painting From The Corrigan Collection Of 21st Century Aboriginal Art, which was launched by former prime minister Kevin Rudd.

It's extraordinary to think that Corrigan actually lives in this apartment. There's no sign of ordinary habitation. No crumbs in the kitchen, just a Ken Whisson painting above the sink.

No cups on the coffee table, just skyscrapers of art books. No pillows in the spare room cupboards, just row upon immaculate row of files charting Corrigan's determined, innovative and quirky course through the Australian contemporary art world.

The observation that everything is perfectly organised elicits a throwaway response: "I'm a Virgo." A part-time librarian keeps the files in order, but no curator is on contract to Corrigan's collection. He's having too much fun doing it himself.

Corrigan started his own freight forwarding firm in 1968. Publisher Kevin Weldon was a client, and by visiting Weldon's northern beaches home Corrigan met many leading figures in the art world.

Corrigan started to buy art and support young artists, and gradually carved out a unique niche.

"I'm telling you, you've never met anything like it," says Joe Eisenberg, director of the Maitland Regional Art Gallery. "He's not rolling in it like the Ainsworths or the Belgiorno-Nettis's (famous art philanthropist families), but he's absolutely unique because he puts people together."

Corrigan has the knack of making things happen for artists. When Eisenberg was trying to raise money to publish portfolios of artists' prints which he would then sell as a fund-raiser for New England Regional Art Gallery in Armidale, Corrigan was the only one who agreed to stump up the seeding money.

"He said 'if I get a couple of portfolios for myself, I will bankroll it'," Eisenberg says. "Some people think that's not very nice. But I raised a lot of money for the art museum in Armidale and then he proceeded over the years to give (his own) portfolios to other leading galleries. So he didn't keep it for himself. What he's got is that Yiddish word 'chutzpah'.

"He has the gall to ask anyone about anything any time."

Corrigan's generosity is legion. He refuses to put artworks in storage so a lot of his private collection is displayed across universities and public galleries which have it on loan. When works eventually come back, he groans about the task of what to do with them next.

He estimates between 2000 and 3000 art works have passed through his hands, most of them donated. In his latest act of philanthropy, last month, he donated photographic art works from the early careers of Cherine Fahd and Alexander Seton to the National Gallery of Australia.

Corrigan is also a huge book collector, and recently bought the Newtown bookshop Better Read Than Dead. He has given $1 million worth of archival material relating to the artistic Lindsay family to the State Library of Queensland, and donated his artists' bookplate collection to the Art Gallery of NSW.

He is chairman of the Gold Coast City Art Gallery and its Foundation. His second home is on the Gold Coast, where his wife Barbara organises exhibition tours to Sydney.

In 2000, Corrigan received an Order of Australia for services to the arts. Aged 80, Corrigan says an art collector needs determination, physical fitness and a good memory.

And he's willing to share a few good tips. Turn up at art auctions near the end, he advises, when many of the other bidders have gone home.

Speaking of auctions, 90 works from Australian television mogul Reg Grundy's art collection go under the hammer with Bonhams' Sydney branch on June 26. Although Corrigan pays a compliment to Grundy's eye for art, he's not that interested in the auction which will include blue-chips like Arthur Boyd, John Brack and Fred Williams.

"I'm a bit off-beat and quirky with what I collect and I think (the Grundy sale) will be really top-class traditional Australian art," Corrigan says.

He adores contemporary art. In his apartment there are works by leading artists such as Louise Hearman, Hossein Valamanesh, Noel McKenna, Tracey Moffatt, Alex Seton, Ben Quilty, Michael Zavros, Adam Cullen and Jonathan Jones.

Even his bedroom looks like a gallery, with three sculptures by Lionel Bawden and paintings by Matthias Gerber and Jess MacNeil, among many other works. These are all big names in the art world. But even the biggest names were once small.

The Pat Corrigan Artists' Grant scheme, which ran between 1990 and 2004, helped more than 1000 emerging artists with small grants of between $200 and $1000.

Most artists used the money to pay for exhibition invitations and catalogues.

But Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro, a collaborative couple who installed a big red airplane outside the Museum of Contemporary Art last year, used their grant to buy beer and food for 40 friends who helped them with an art project in which they dismantled an entire house.

Artist Nell received a grant in 1999 and "when the invitations were printed for show I sent one to Pat with a lipstick kiss on it to say thanks". 

Patricia Piccinini, who has represented Australia at the Venice Biennale, said the Corrigan grants might be relatively small but were "one of the most powerful, positive and effective institutions in the Australian art world".

This year, Alan Jones painted Corrigan for the Archibald Prize and the portrait was hung as a finalist. At a glamorous Archibald lunch in the Sofitel ballroom this week, Jones revealed the level of Corrigan's energy and impatience during their sittings.

"He would call me up at seven o'clock on Saturday morning and say 'get out of bed'," Jones said. "He came over every weekend for six or seven weeks."

Corrigan was chuffed with the picture, although he lost the battle for Jones to paint him smiling.

"It's like me giving back to Pat," Jones says.