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

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.”

However, at the age of 15, Michael did temporarily leave his mother’s custody, after being thrown out of the house and subsequently taken in by a man called Howard Love. Howard was Michael’s art teacher, a middle-class white man with a middle-class white family, and a home with beautiful works of art on the walls which, in stark contrast to Michael’s mother, he displayed proudly side by side with Michael’s own. Howard had noticed that the artwork he submitted at school was frequently scratched or damaged, and often inexplicably went missing soon after it was complete. He took Michael in and nurtured his art and his confidence, and even after he returned to his mother a year later, Howard never really stopped looking out for him.

At the age of 18, Michael became involved in the Moss Side riots. There was no food in the house and he was hungry, and walking past the Co-Op on Princess Parkway he saw that the windows had been put in. “I went in there and got a box of cornflakes, and when I came out I saw the police over on the grass outside Quinney Crescent,” he says. He was arrested and thrown into a van with eight policemen, but Howard Love came to the court and successfully ensured that his sentence was reduced, and that he didn’t end up in prison, instead receiving six months conditional discharge. During this period, Michael’s probation officer helped him find the money to travel to London with his sketches in tow, and he was promptly accepted into the Chelsea College of Arts, which he attended the next year.

He didn’t stay long in London. Soon after graduating, Michael returned to Manchester and to his mother, and after a few years began work on a peculiar project which was to bring him unprecedented global acclaim. The owners of Cocotoo restaurant near Oxford Street station had asked him to create a scaled-down rendition of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel painting on the restaurant ceiling. “I told them I could do it within four months,” says Michael. “I ended up spending two years on it.” Painting publicly from a platform above the diners’ heads, Michael had hoped that the spectacle would gain him some publicity, but none of the newspapers showed any interest — until one morning a journalist from the Sale and Altrincham Messenger got back to him, suggesting that they do a feature. The morning after the feature came out, Michael was all over the national and international news. The Daily Mail did a multi-page spread on him, and NBC came to film him painting for two days. “People came from America to see it,” Michael laughs incredulously. “They’d go see the Sistine Chapel in Rome, and then they’d come to Manchester to see it again in a restaurant.” He recalls with a particular surge of excitement how Pavarotti himself came to visit him while painting. “He loved it!” says Michael. “He had a massive dinner at the restaurant. He had to sit on two chairs side by side cause he’s so big.”

Michael finished his Sistine Chapel in 1994. A few months later (though completely unrelatedly) in January of 1995, Manchester United forward Eric Cantona infamously kung-fu-kicked a racist spectator, and Michael had a new idea for a painting.

He originally wanted to portray Cantona as St Sebastian — the persecuted figure. He sent the footballer a letter, asking him to collaborate with him on the painting, but his wife responded that he wasn’t interested. “I thought: Sod it,” Michael tells me, “I’m gonna do something anyway.” When Cantona’s ban on playing was lifted, Michael changed the design to depict his footballing resurrection and return to the game, and began work on it in Barca, a canal-side tapas bar in Castlefield, which let him use their space for free. “Ten months I was on it,” says Michael, “but within the first two or three weeks of starting on it, one morning I looked around and guess who’s in the distance? Eric, sat there on a chair, watching me.” Michael showed Eric the work in progress, and they started chatting, and got on well. Eric agreed to pose for the painting, and within a few weeks he had asked to purchase it in advance. He even brought his father, a fellow painter, to meet Michael. “He couldn’t speak any English,” Michael tells me, “and I couldn’t speak any French, so we just nodded at each other.” A few months later, the portrait was unveiled in the Manchester Art Gallery.

“That was the time I brought my mother in to see it, to prove to her that I can do it,” Michael says. The exhibition was in 1997, just three years before his mother’s death. He tells me how Cantona, and David Beckham, and even Sir Alex Ferguson came to the exhibition while his mum was in attendance, and recounts how she got to meet Sir Alex, who gave her his autograph and a hug. Suddenly distracted from the artwork itself, Michael tells me how delighted his mother was when, after selling the painting, he pulled up to her Moss Side home in a bright green Range Rover, to prove to her that an artist can make it. But how did she feel about the actual painting? He smiles at me broadly: “Proud!” 

Our weekend to do list

Friday

🌍 Today is World Poetry Day – as I’m sure you’re all well aware – and as such the usually-Bradford-but-occasionally-Manchester-based poetry night More Song is coming to SEESAW on Princess Street. There’s an excellent line-up, and it’s free.

🌀 The UK’s most celebrated hip-hop theatre company Boy Blue are making their way to Factory International. Their latest production, Cycles, is “movement at its most fluid, distilled, and skilled.”

Saturday

🇮🇷 Hamsaz, a 15-strong ensemble of Iranian migrant musicians, is coming to Band on the Wall as part of the Manchester Folk Festival — and the performance is free.

🌸 The award-winning Sale Gilbert and Sullivan society are bringing their production of The Mikado to Z-arts in Hulme. Tickets cost £16, and are free to under 16s.

Sunday

👰 As part of their Women’s History Month special, Bad Gal Film Club are presenting BIFA and BAFTA long-listed short film Sister Wives, alongside a Q&A with director Louisa Connolly-Burnham.

🪩 And certified National Treasure Vicky McClure is bringing Day Fever to New Century Hall — a daytime clubbing event for all those who incorrectly thought their raving days were behind them.

Got a To Do you’d like us to list? Tell us about it here.