It’s everywhere: squeezed on to each spare space of wall in the apartment; in the flourish of a red handkerchief in his jacket pocket; in the eloquence of his words.

His father, the nation’s greatest living artist John Olsen, AO, OBE, once remarked that his son was a sensual man. But as he prepares to publish a book on his life, Olsen Jnr clearly thinks as expansively as he feels.

He’s considering Matisse and how the French artist didn’t try to conceal his creative accidents.

“I love Matisse’s work because he never completely rubbed out the areas where the work was going in the wrong direction,” enthuses Olsen.

“He allowed the mistakes or the mis-directions to become part of the truth of the art work. “There’s no such thing as making a mistake. Mistakes are lessons.”

It’s a philosophy the gallery owner applies to his own life.

Having lived in the shadow of his famous father, grieved the death of his mother, processed the breakdown of his marriage, lost 45 kilos and successfully fought back from alcoholism, it’s a largely calm and content man who sits down to discuss all that lies ahead.

Of course there are challenges, most recently the legal action his father has launched against his stepdaughter Karen Mentink over $2.2 million of his late wife’s money. When we speak Olsen has just spent the week in the Southern Highlands supporting his father as the case was before the Supreme Court in Moss Vale.

The situation has caused sleepless nights for father and son.

“It’s been a huge strain on my 91-year-old father,” he says quietly, sipping mineral water. “These are the years he should be in peace and really enjoying the last days of his life.” Fortunately, the younger Olsen now has tools to deal with such stress.

He walks on the beach, swims and meditates daily. At weekends he writes at his father’s home, immerses himself in nature, and catches up with his 15-year-old son, James. His work, too, is energising as he envisions a major redesign of the Jersey Rd gallery with local interior designer Michelle Macarounas — they are considering redesigning the façade of the gallery with tiles that nod to the Sydney Opera House where one of John Olsen’s major works is exhibited, and there are even plans for a mural.

Olsen is also collaborating with Macarounas’ studio on a retail pop up down the road in the Queens Court giving him another place to display his artists amid a showcase of modern design pieces.

Olsen exhibits both the stalwarts and the bright young things of Australian art. In the past year his gallery’s high profile celebrations have included Gary Heery, George Byrne — brother of Rose, and Noah Taylor.

But his apartment is less a testament to careful curation and more an expression of a life lived both large and curious.

Works from giants such as Brett Whiteley, AO, and Lucien Freud, OM, jostle for space next to family photographs, endeavours by multiple Olsens — John, sister Louise, his late mother Valerie, son James’s primary school dabbling and Tim himself — and even an enlarged copy of one of his early school reports.

“Tim has a happy disposition and plays well with all children at kindergarten,” it reads.

“He enjoys painting and craft work. Tim is very agreeable and always gay.”

Olsen leans back and laughs. He attributes his newfound happiness and ease to a conversation with his mother as she lay dying of brain cancer in 2011.

Valerie Olsen’s hospital room overlooked the art school where she had first met John, her husband of 19 years, and on that day she chose to speak plainly to her son. “She told me she didn’t care much for my gallery or my fashionable friends, and my Range Rover didn’t impress her,” recalls Olsen.

When he pointed out that it was unlike her to speak that way, she told him she had something far more powerful to say. With tears pooling in his eyes, Olsen relates her message: “She told me ‘I’m so proud of you because you’ve learnt how to be yourself and to love yourself and that’s all a mother wants for her child’.”

When Olsen questioned why she hadn’t told him earlier, she replied that he had to work it out for himself. “I had lived under a huge shadow all my life,” he says.

“How could I ever be what my father is? Ultimately, I had to surrender that I was never going to be my father. I’m no longer afraid of being compared to him.

“It wasn’t about what people thought any more; it was about how I lived my own life with integrity and dignity.”

To that end Olsen gave up drinking — he refers to himself as a non-practising alcoholic — and lost weight. He’s proud of the friendship he’s retained with his former wife Dominique Ogilvie and relishes the holidays the family still enjoys together — most recently to Capri in Italy.

“I woke up one day and realised what I’ve got to be grateful for. I looked at my son and realised I wasn’t loving myself.

“I gave up drinking, started doing meditation and focused on being more selfless. I embraced what I can give rather than what I can get for myself.”

Olsen has a portfolio career of sorts. As well as writing his memoir, Son Of A Brush, he owns three galleries: Olsen and Olsen Annexe in Australia and Olsen Gruin in New York. He has plans to open another in London. Yet the 57-year-old also channels his experience into helping others.

He’s on the foundation board of the University of New South Wales, sponsors a drawing prize at the School of Art and Design and instituted an art prize at his alma mater, The Kings School.

He regularly loans his galleries for fundraising events; his New York space hosted an event for Anna Wintour and Vogue.

He says he can’t understand how our actors, musicians and writers enjoy global acclaim but visual artists struggle to gain pertinence.

“We don’t need to think subordinately of our own quality. We’re written off too easily as being a country of larrikinism and little intellectual substance. I want to do my bit to try to prove that wrong.”

He’s also a convert to the power of spirituality and a deep inner life.

One of his greatest joys is spending time in his father’s Bowral home. Typically, Olsen Snr sketches, his sister Louise paints and he writes, infusing him with a similar contentment to that he felt as a child growing up in Watsons Bay.

It’s a feeling captured in John Olsen’s large painting, Holiday by the Sea, for sale in the gallery.

As the artist’s son speaks wistfully, pointing out details in the large yellow work, he makes the point that nature is the essence of life. “My father’s work and its expression of the vastness of Australia is about centring the greater force that surrounds us.”

After years of internal disquiet, Olsen has found peace. He wants to enjoy these last years of his father’s life. As for his appreciation of Matisse, the artist’s philosophy of living with imperfection may be even more resonant than he first thought. For while Matisse painted, his son Pierre ran a gallery.

To borrow one of Olsen’s words, perhaps there is equal pertinence in being the son of a brush as being the artist himself.

Woollahra’s cult hit

With her interior design studio located inside the intensely pink, Insta-famous Queens Court building on the corner of Moncur St and Queen St, Michelle Macarounas has been capturing local attention with her curated window displays.

Passing by the building Tim Olsen was entranced by her design and admiring of her growing presence in the precinct — Macarounas has been appointed to reconfigure the beloved former Zigolini’s site on Queen St into a concept fashion store. Olsen promptly commissioned her to oversee the upcoming redesign of his Jersey Rd gallery with a view to designing a space where visitors are invited to linger — and hopefully imagine the art works in their home.

As Macarounas puts it: “galleries are often intimidating and sterile. We want to show how art can add substance and depth to a home.

“You don’t need to buy a $20,000 painting. You can start with something small and learn to appreciate it. I’m all about having fun.” Olsen agrees: “A lot of galleries are so precious about how they operate. Michelle has very good taste and great vision but she’s unpretentious.

“Art is part of intellectual and spiritual nourishment but what we don’t really focus on is that art is to be lived with.”

Getting art and design into people’s homes is also the impetus for the latest Macarounas initiative taking place at Queens Court.

Macarounas has lured Richard Munao, of Chippendale’s Cult design store to Woollahra for a collaboration that has set the street abuzz — the Cult Curated Edition — with M Contemporary director Michelle Paterson, Simon Cormack of South Pacific Fabrics, furniture design luminary Adam Goodrum and Olsen of course, also on board.

Furniture, lighting and accessories from international and local brands including Poltrona Frau, Carl Hansen, HAY, Gubi, Danish company & Tradition, NAU, Zanotta and Cappellini, will be on show — and on sale — in the pop-up store from this week, as well as artwork from Olsen Gallery, M Contemporary and Otomys not to mention fabrics from Kvadrat and South Pacific Fabric.

Munao says he is excited to showcase “a Louis Poulsen floor lamp with a Cappellini sofa and a Poltrona Frau side table”, for instance, telling the Wentworth Courier “we are looking forward to being a part of this new community … located in Woollahra’s Queens Court.” Says Goodrum: “I love the eclectic nature (of the Cult Collective) … it is a honour to have my work sitting along side such an array of significant art and design”.

Cormack, describing South Pacific Fabrics as “a local family business” adds that he is “thrilled to be involved with the … growth of the flourishing design hub in Woollahra”. M Contemporary’s Patterson appears to be of one mind with Olsen when she talks about the need to do more to welcome buyers into galleries and indeed, seek them beyond the gallery walls: “I feel strongly that art should be accessible and we need to not only nurture our artists but also our new collectors,” she says. “By taking the art out of the stark and sometimes intimidating white cube and placing it in a more approachable setting we can engage with everyone.”