Brian Manning: ‘I hang out with the best painters, classical guitarists and jiu-jitsu black belts’

Art: What Lies Beneath

Towards Poolbeg Towers by Brian Manning

Niall MacMonagle

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.