Artist Michael Browne on painting this city’s Sistine Chapel, selling work to Cantona and unveiling his newest exhibit at Manchester Museum

Dear readers — This isn’t the first time Michael Browne has made headlines. You may have heard of him when back in 1994 he painted a scaled-down version of the Sistine Chapel ceiling in a Whitworth Street restaurant — or a few years later when he depicted Manchester United forward Eric Cantona as a resurrected Roman. Now he’s back with a new painting at Manchester Museum, and Ophira went to visit him there to chat about everything from the Moss Side riots, to Pavarotti, to flying kung-fu kicks. That’s after the briefing.

Your briefing

📚 Louis Kushnick, a professor of sociology at the University of Manchester and the founder of the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Centre, named in honour of the schoolboy killed in a racist attack in Burnage, has died aged 86. In his obituary, his son, John Kushnick, writes that he “stood out in 70s suburban Manchester, with his long hair and beard, driving an original VW campervan and bearing a passing resemblance to Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead guitarist.”

📰 We’re sending our best wishes to staff at Rochdale Online, which ceased trading and initiated liquidation proceedings this week after struggling to attract advertisers. In 2017, Rochdale Online won a copyright case against the MEN after it found the website had taken the key points of its article without permission or credit, later syndicating it to the Guardian. At the time, Rochdale Online warned that local journalism would “cease to exist” if major publishers were allowed to reword and recycle stories from smaller outlets.

🎻 Some good news from Olympias, a local charity providing free music lessons to children of refugees and families on low incomes, who have just rescued 78 violas and cellos from landfill. The charity will be carrying out repairs on the instruments this weekend as part of their Recycled Orchestra programme, which aims to provide free instruments to young people.

You can tell from the clock dabbed neatly on the side of the Palace of Westminster that, in this painting, it’s always 9am. An off-screen sun throws its light about the canvas, so that various historical figures on the left of the painting cast long shadows upon contemporary ones on the right. On the left, among many others, we have King Charles II, Queen Anne, William Gladstone, and an African slave whose skin glistens with scars as if the paint or the whip was just recently put upon him. The right hand ensemble is more eclectic: Kemi Badenoch, Marcus Rashford, Christopher Eccleston disguised as a weeping prophet, and in the bottom right corner, Michael’s father gazing about the painting, a look of bewilderment on his face. Michael explains that, in many ways, his father’s presence in the painting is merely a representation of himself. “I put myself on this platform,” he tells me, gesturing towards the canvas. “I’ve got illusions of grandeur.”

Michael Browne, 62, is unveiling his most recent artwork in a private corner of Manchester Museum — a large, white, empty room that differs greatly to the scene before us, where characters peer over each other’s shoulders in order to be seen, or perhaps to see. Named ‘Sovereign Servant’, the painting is heavily inspired by ‘The Apotheosis of Homer’ — a grand and cluttered 19th century painting in which 44 figures pay homage to the poet. ‘Sovereign Servant’ is painted in the same Neoclassical style: high-brow art with a low-brow narrative, as Michael puts it. The result is a portrait of a country and of an identity, namely Michael’s own. “The whole idea of the painting is based on me as a Mancunian looking down on another world,” he explains, highlighting the depictions of London-based royalty profiting off the industrial revolution and cotton trade in the north west. There’s an ironic detachment to the scene. “All it needs now is a nice grand royal style frame.”

Michael’s life was always a far cry from the royalty and decadence so frequently depicted in his art. He was born in Moss Side, in a back-to-back terraced house with an outdoor toilet. His father was from St Vincent, part of the Windrush Generation, and he left Michael and his mother when he was two years old, taking his younger brother with him. Michael barely knew him. “But he looked like a decent bloke actually,” he says. “He left my mum because of the booze.” His mother was an Irish immigrant, though neither of them ever knew from where. An adoptee, crippled in the Blitz as an infant, she grew up in Bollington, a small town in Cheshire, with no idea who her family was. By the time Michael was born, she’d had two children from a different father taken off her, and was addicted to alcohol. Michael shows me a photo of her reclining on a brown leather sofa with her boyfriend at the time, a half-drunk jug of lager raised to the camera. “I’d do drawings of her when I was young,” Michael tells me. “There was a Renaissance-style integrity to her appearance.”

Michael is, by many metrics, a complicated interviewee. Quiet but passionate in his demeanour, he moves constantly about the room while we speak, clambering over the exhibition wires to point out the details of his painting. He jumps about in time and subject. He shows me photos of his mother and his art in lieu of finishing his sentences. When he tells me about his childhood, he switches erratically between seemingly pre-rehearsed lines – clipped details of falling in with bad crowds and eating sugar sandwiches – to sudden, almost accidental confessions.

Many of these confessions centre on his experiences with his mother — a topic he is initially and understandably reluctant to go into any sort of detail on. When asked to recount experiences from his childhood, he presents them as theoretical examples of abuse rather than memories, making loose references to ‘arguments’ and ‘beatings’, while never quite saying that he himself, as a child, was the one being beaten. The harm his mother inflicted on his art, however, he is far more willing to divulge.

Left on his own while his mother was out drinking, he began making art at just five years old, doodling images on the walls of dinosaur dioramas and flying superheroes. Once he had progressed to more tangible works of art – canvases and models and 3D sculptures – his mother would regularly find excuses to destroy them, an act that Michael chalks up to envy, and a feeling that art was a waste of time. When I press him for examples of her destruction, he tells me first about her scratching the boards on which he painted.

Later, he tells me about an incident with a boat he had made, which he recounts in a peculiar, distant manner, as if it hadn’t necessarily happened. “If I made a model boat that was so good,” he says, “I’d put it in the bath in warm water, and cause I’d use the warm water, she’d go berserk and take the boat and throw it over the balcony.” Despite such incidents, Michael speaks of his mother with unwavering empathy and an almost parental fondness, showing me pictures of her as a baby, remarking on how beautiful she was as a child. “And then it all went wrong,” he says. “She just had no hope. When you’ve got mixed race children in the ’60s, it’s not easy.” On one occasion, Michael was even fostered by another family, but he escaped and returned to his mother almost immediately. “I ran away. I ran back to her,” he says. “Despite all the beatings and all that, I just couldn’t be away.”