Michael Taylor at Canberra Museum and Gallery

Canberra is about to get a crash course in one of its best-kept secrets – a full survey of the work of one of Australia's most significant expressionist painters, who happens to have lived and worked in the region for decades. Canberra Museum and Gallery will be exhibiting more than 40 of his paintings and drawings spanning six decades. Many of these works have been held in public collections for years, without being on display, and seeing them all together will be something of a revelation, at least in the art world.

But for the artist himself, the show will likely tell him more about the future than the past. Taylor has, by his own admission, an unusual aptitude for remembering details. In an artistic career spanning 60 years, he has worked consistently and prolifically, with works in most major public collections and a great many private ones. And yet, apart from the odd work or two that sold especially quickly, he can recall pretty much every work he's ever done.

"I've got a very retentive memory about work," he says.

"In fact, even in life. I go back and I can remember kindergarten, and I lie awake at night thinking about things that happened at primary school, and it's the same with the work."

So, seeing the first major survey of his work will be less of a revelation than a confirmation of his mental records. And it's been a long time coming. Taylor is about to turn 83, and is one of Australia's most important living artists. His paintings adorn public arts spaces, parliamentary offices, homes, gallery and museum walls; the National Gallery of Australia alone owns 17 of his large-scale, immersive abstracts.

But while he has exhibited prolifically throughout his career, there has never been an opportunity to view the trajectory of his practice in the form of a survey show, until now.

Exhibition curator Deborah Clark says it's difficult to pinpoint why such a show has taken so long, given that Taylor is often described as both an "artist's artist" and a "curator's artist".

"It has so much to do with his choices, and I also think weirdly it has to do with fashion," says Clark.

"The more I look at it, the more puzzling it is to me."

Born in Sydney in 1933, Taylor spent his early life around Sydney Harbour, and had an idyllic childhood surrounded by water.

"He swam from an early age and also rowed, immersed in the life of the water, its movement and flux, its changing light," writes Clark in her catalogue essay.

His father, C.G. "Paddy" Taylor was a draughtsman for the Sydney City Council, and so the home was often strewn with drafting paper and drawing materials. Paddy was also what Taylor describes as a "Sunday painter", albeit a prolific one: his work was hung in the Archibald more than a dozen times, and was a frequent finalist in the Wynne prize for landscape painting.

"The annual preparation for the Art Gallery of NSW competitions was a serious affair in the Taylor household," says Clark. It's not surprising, then, that Taylor had his parents' blessings when he left school at 15 to study at art school.

"He was trained by the National Art School teachers, he had a few of those really important abstract painters like Ralph Balson and Frank Hinder, and some more conservative ones," she says.

It was while at art school that he met and married his wife, ceramicist Rominie Taylor. The couple had two sons, and shortly after the second was born, in 1960, Taylor won the prestigious and much-coveted New South Wales Travelling Art Scholarship. The family sailed to Europe and stayed for three years, beginning in England and moving onto warmer climes in Spain, where the scholarship money would stretch further for a family of four. It was a life-changing experience, not least because it was there that he discovered the works of Velasquez and Goya, who became profound influences on his work.

"Although [Taylor's] painting doesn't look particularly figurative or representational … those works were really important to him," says Clark.

"By the time he was 30, in 1963, he had formed a mature style of gestural expressionism which has been the wellspring for his art ever since."

In 1971, Taylor took up a teaching position at the ANU School of Art, and the family packed up their life in Sydney and moved to Canberra.

"Once we got to Canberra, my son got interested in trout fishing, and we used to drive out on weekends to trout streams all over the place that he'd looked up on the map," Taylor says.

"One time, we were going through Bredbo and we saw this house for sale, and it was unbelievably cheap – $4000 or something like that – and we thought it was worth moving into the country for that."

It was another career-defining move, and one the family has never regretted. The Taylors have lived on the Monaro – in Bredbo, Michelago and Cooma – ever since, and the landscape has deeply informed Taylor's work, a guiding force in the form and atmosphere of his paintings, from crisp, snowy tracks to winding rivers.

Although the CMAG exhibition shows works from all decades of Taylor's oeuvre, Clark says Taylor's career peaked in the 1970s.

"He was incredibly well known. If you think about [John] Olsen, that period of the '60s and '70s, in Sydney in particular, there was a real interest in abstraction and in abstracted landscapes. Michael would say he's never really thought of himself as an abstract expressionist, which is a term that people use a lot, but the work is actually always ground in figuration and landscape, it's not pure abstraction."

Throughout his practice, Taylor has worked prolifically and held regular solo exhibitions in Sydney and Canberra, many of which included 30 or more new works.

Taylor's place in the art world has a lot in common with Elioth Gruner, another neglected artist of the Monaro and subject of a recent CMAG retrospective curated by Clark. Indeed, she has had a similar experience in the course of gathering works for the show.

"[People say] 'Oh, it's so fantastic that you're doing a show, Michael so deserves it, his work hasn't been seen enough, there's never been a survey'," she says.

"Artists love his work, painters love his work."

The show's assistant curator, Sheridan Burnett, agrees.

"He should be more popular because his art is quite accessible, even though it's abstract. It still is based in representation, and people see the works and go, 'I know where that is or what that's saying to me'," she says.

"He's so well liked and respected by so many critics and important people in the arts community but he just hasn't transcended into that next stage."

Fairfax art critic Sasha Grishin, in reviewing Taylor's last solo show at Nancy Sever Gallery in 2015, also draws comparisons with the work of Olsen.

"As an artist, Taylor has followed a quieter and, one could say, a more consistent trajectory," he writes. "There are many parallels: both artists committed to oil painting, watercolours and etchings, both explore the abstracted landscape, both possess a gentle sense of humour and both have developed a very personal iconography. Like with an Olsen, you can tell a Michael Taylor at 20 paces."

But he points out that consistency in Taylor's case does not equal stagnation or repetition.

"In some ways, there is a diaristic approach in his art, where each work builds on the last."

Taylor himself says seeing such a large number of his works together, many of which have not been on display for many years, will be an instructive experience for him, although he won't make any unforeseen discoveries.

"I've got a pretty good idea of what I've done. It's interesting to see them all coming back from various places," he says.

"I'll probably go in and look at it and see where I should go next."

Michael Taylor: A Survey 1963-2016 opens at Canberra Museum and Gallery on July 9 and runs until October 2.