Towering achievement thanks to a helping hand

BRIAN MANNING

Towards Poolbeg Towers from Sandymount

As a youngster, Brian Manning “wasn’t interested in art” but now “I simply can’t stop painting”. “Born under the shadow of the Poolbeg Towers in Sandymount,” he grew up “playing in the streets and catching crabs in buckets on the strand.”

Manning’s father was a postman, his grandfather a barman, and his was “a fairly typical working-class Dublin upbringing”. His boyhood bedroom held “Da’s books on floor-to-ceiling shelves” and how he discovered reading.

“The story of Miyamoto Musashi [1584-1645], the greatest Japanese swordsman, was just the hero the younger me needed, being a natural contrarian, individualist and introvert,” he says. “Mushashi was also a Sumi-e, a Japanese ink and brush artist. Mushashi says ‘the Warrior’s way is the twofold way of pen and sword’ and that quote is never far from my mind.”

He took up the guitar at 15, but didn’t make it as a rock god like his hero Jimi Hendrix. These days he plays classical guitar. He says now: “I hang out and create with the best of painters, the best classical guitarists and the best jiu-jitsu black belts.”

When he was 18 the family moved to Bray, where the coastline became important (“I tend to paint there a lot”). He paints mainly en plein air – “it’s much more immersive to paint on location” – though “the wind is the real killer. I have a painting of Donabate Martello Tower that blew off into the sand. I couldn’t get the sand out so I left it like that, an unusual texture.”

Manning’s subject matter also includes the Gap of Dunloe, a Kilruddery oak, the mountains above Skellig Chocolate Factory, a croissant, and dolmens.

He has painted more than 10 scenes of Knockneen dolmen in Waterford “where I had to cross a dangerous field of cows and electric fences”, while Boleycarrigeen stone circle in Wicklow, “was the spookiest place. Haunted or something.”

The day job is working with people with learning disabilities, and has “three really cool kids and a very understanding wife”.

It was when he turned 40 that Manning’s “unconscious came alive”. Every night for several years he would dream of his house in Sandymount, or the Poolbeg Towers.

Manning’s Towards Poolbeg Towers from Sandymount is one of 70 works in this year’s Dublin Painting and Sketching Club Exhibition. Founded in 1874, today the club has 88 active members and over the past 150 years has showcased more than 5,000 paintings of landscapes, streets, seascapes and Dubliners. Former members include Bram Stoker, John B Yeats, William Orpen, Sarah Purser and Flora Mitchell.

Painted last summer, Towards Poolbeg Towers from Sandymount meant being “on location for three hours” and “a boy from a Brazilian family living nearby watched me for ages. He showed me his drawings and I let him paint some brush strokes on this piece.”

Manning finished it off at home “with another couple of layers to really develop the colours and textures”.

This oil on board, with its textured lower section, sea, wall, footpath, could belong to an abstract work and the sunlit, varied greenery and shadowed buildings and those two towers rising elegantly against that summer-blue sky, is excellently composed. It’s pure Dub – with a Brazilian touch.

‘Dublin Then and Now, Celebrating 150 years’ by The Dublin Painting and Sketching Club, Cowshed Gallery, Farmleigh, until May 19