The Margaret Olley Art Centre opened on 15 March 2014, built at a cost of around four million dollars, and at its heart is a careful recreation of the rooms where Olley lived and worked, principally the spaces she called the Hat Factory and the Yellow Room. More than seventy-six thousand of her possessions were transported north from Sydney and reinstalled exactly as she kept them, a still life made three-dimensional and walkable. The effect is uncanny and intimate. You are not looking at a tidy museum display but standing inside the controlled clutter of a working artist, the same jars and blooms and ornaments she turned into paint, frozen at the moment she set down her brush for the last time. Alongside the recreated rooms, the centre weaves in exhibitions and interactive displays, so that the woman and her method are explained as well as preserved. Few places in Australia let you step so completely into the mind of a painter.

Olley was one of Australia's most beloved still-life and interior painters, but she also kept turning up on the other side of the easel. She was the subject of two Archibald Prize-winning portraits, an unusually rare distinction. The first came in 1948, when William Dobell painted her in a borrowed wedding dress made of parachute silk, a portrait that helped make her famous before she had fully made her own name. The second came in 2011, the year she died, when Ben Quilty's portrait of her won the same prize, bookending a career of more than ninety solo exhibitions. Born in 1923 and made a Companion of the Order of Australia, she gave generously to public collections throughout her life.

Portraiture runs deep at this gallery beyond the Olley connection. The Tweed Regional Gallery hosts the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize, founded in 1988 and billed as the richest portrait prize anywhere on Earth, with 150,000 Australian dollars going to the winner. It also runs the Olive Cotton Award, a biennial national prize for excellence in photographic portraiture, launched in 2005 in memory of the pioneering Australian photographer. For a gallery in a town of fewer than ten thousand people, hosting both is a quiet statement of ambition, drawing artists and visitors from across the country into the green Tweed Valley to compete and to look.

The setting earns its keep. The gallery sits within the Tweed Volcano caldera, looking out over the river and the cane fields toward the surrounding ranges, with the sacred peak of Wollumbin presiding over the southern horizon. On the grounds stands a sculpture by Tim Storrier titled The Grand Impedimenta, one of several works that greet visitors before they reach the door. The combination, world-class art inside, an ancient volcanic landscape outside, has made the gallery one of the cultural anchors of the Northern Rivers, the reason a steady stream of travellers turns inland from the coast and climbs the hill above the Tweed.