Between Brushstrokes and Brass Notes - Limerick’s Treaty Brewery Becomes a Living Canvas

Between Brushstrokes and Brass Notes

Limerick’s Treaty Brewery Becomes a Living Canvas

by

Kieran Beville

On a cool sunny Sunday afternoon in September, Nicholas Street hums with a certain electricity. It’s the kind of vibration that runs deeper than footsteps on cobblestones or the murmur of passing cars. It’s a pulse, a resonance carried down the row of Georgian and Victorian facades to the heavy wooden doors of the Treaty City Brewery. Inside, time stretches differently. Strong beer foams golden in pint glasses, brass horns wail, and paint on canvas whispers its silent counterpoint.

Every year, when Culture Night rolls across Ireland like a rolling tide of creativity, the Treaty Brewery throws open its doors to more than its loyal regulars. It becomes, for a week, part gallery, part listening room, part living room. The brewery transforms into a layered cultural organism where the worlds of art and music aren’t just curated side by side—they lean into one another, breathing the same air, overlapping in improvisation like jazz solos finding common ground.

I slipped into this world on Sunday, September 21st, drawn by word of mouth, curiosity, and the promise of a collision between painted canvas and blue note. By 3pm, the place was already filling up. By 4pm, it was packed. And by the end of the afternoon, I realized I had stumbled into something more than an exhibition—it was a conversation between disciplines, a quiet celebration of community, and a microcosm of the way Limerick continues to reinvent itself as a cultural city.

The Soundtrack of a Sunday

Sunday at Treaty isn’t a secret anymore. Between 3 and 6pm, the brewery hums with live jazz, no entry fee, no cover charge, just a casual invitation to step inside and let the music do its work. It’s a gift to the city, and the city answers. This Sunday, the crowd was thick with international students, their conversations rolling in Portuguese rhythms that hinted at a Brazilian majority. They sipped their pints of strong beer, tore into chunky toasted sandwiches, and let the music carry them.

Downstairs, the jazz band carved out their stage in front of gleaming chrome brewing vats. There’s something poetic about musicians framed by the machinery of fermentation—the slow alchemy of yeast and grain mirroring the improvisational magic of a saxophone solo. Both are labours of patience and spontaneity, of science and soul.

The band itself was multicultural, a patchwork of accents and styles, and tight in their performance. Their sound filled the downstairs space with urgency, the kind that pushes through bodies and walls alike. Yet upstairs, just a flight away, the same notes softened. They floated into the lofted room like a memory, dissolving into background music, distant enough to talk over but present enough to remind you that art was happening somewhere just beneath your feet.

The Upstairs Salon

Upstairs, the brewery becomes something closer to a bohemian salon. Old but comfortable couches anchor the space, soft furnishings worn down into familiarity. The décor is minimalist, not by design but by necessity—the kind of aesthetic you get when a working brewery is repurposed into a gallery for a week.

It’s here that the artworks hang, directly above the heads of people sprawled on couches with pints in hand. There’s an awkward intimacy to the arrangement: to study a piece closely, you have to lean in, often apologising to whoever happens to be occupying the couch below. I found myself murmuring “pardon me” more than once, craning forward to catch sight of a label, to squint at a price tag, to see brushwork up close.

The works upstairs leaned toward the eclectic—an unruly chorus of voices and visions, stitched together by proximity rather than theme. Yet within the mix, certain names and styles rose above the fray. There was Brian MacMahon, his thickly layered oil painting bursting from the canvas with a tactile force that seemed almost sculptural.

MacMahon paints as though colour were squeezed straight from the tube into form, his textures carrying the weight of immediacy. Priced at €900, the piece felt like a hidden treasure, a rare bargain considering his work usually sells for double. To see it unframed, raw against the brewery wall, was to witness an artwork stripped of ceremony, offered instead as a companion to beer, jazz, and conversation.

Nearby hung a striking piece, instantly recognisable and carrying its own gravitas. Yet value, like beauty, is subjective, and in this setting—surrounded by both amateur experiments and accomplished brushwork—the sense of worth felt inflated. I couldn’t help but imagine a different figure altogether, a reminder that in art, valuation is as much about context as it is about canvas.

The Wall of Voices

Downstairs, opposite the brewing vats and sharing space with the band, stretched a wall of smaller works. Oils, acrylics, watercolours, charcoal sketches, chalk smudges, pastel experiments—all clustered together like a marketplace of imagination. The display had a democratic energy to it, each piece jostling for attention (a butterfly by Joanne Maloney caught my eye), the amateur and the accomplished sharing equal billing.

But here too, the act of viewing became performance. Customers leaned against the wall, their backs obscuring paintings, their laughter drowning labels. I lifted my camera more than once, angling for shots, only to catch wary glances from people convinced I was photographing them. I reassured them quickly: it’s the art, not you. You’ll be cropped out. Still, the exchange highlighted the tension of this hybrid space—gallery and bar colliding, viewers and patrons overlapping, everyone part of the same tableau.

It struck me then that this was not a flaw but the very essence of the exhibition. Art here wasn’t detached, framed in silence on white gallery walls. It was embedded in life—above couches, behind pints, beside brewing vats, obscured by strangers. To see it required negotiation, intrusion, conversation. And in that way, it mirrored jazz itself: participatory, messy, improvisational.

Between Pint and Palette

There’s something almost radical about seeing art in a brewery. Not in a sterile, curated museum, but in a working space where yeast ferments in polished tanks and toasted sandwiches leave crumbs on table-tops. It democratises the experience. A student sipping a €7 beer might find themselves face-to-face with a €900 MacMahon, no admission fee required, no silent gallery guards hovering nearby. The brewery becomes a threshold where anyone—Brazilian student, local regular, wandering journalist—can brush up against the world of art without ceremony.

The result is a kind of levelling, a refusal to let art exist only in spaces of wealth or exclusivity. Here, art sits alongside life, as much a part of the Sunday ritual as live jazz or a sandwich.

Limerick’s Growing Canvas

What struck me most was how seamlessly this event folded into Limerick’s evolving cultural identity. For years, the city has been shaking off old reputations and reinventing itself as a hub of creativity, energy, and international connection. The Treaty Brewery’s annual exhibition, now a fixture of Culture Night and the week beyond, is proof of that transformation. It doesn’t attempt to imitate the formality of high art institutions. Instead, it leans into what Limerick does best: community, improvisation, and inclusivity. It welcomes the amateur as readily as the established, the Brazilian student as warmly as the local. It makes space for jazz to coexist with oils, for sandwiches to mingle with brushstrokes. It acknowledges that culture doesn’t have to be cordoned off—it thrives when it spills over, overlaps, and finds new homes.
The Final Note

By the time I left that Sunday, the afternoon light had thinned, and the music downstairs had given way to the quiet clatter of glasses and closing conversations. I carried with me the memory of textures: the thickness of MacMahon’s oils, the sharpness of a trumpet blast, the soft worn fabric of a couch, the clink of a pint on wood.

The Treaty Brewery’s exhibition isn’t perfect—it’s awkward, crowded, occasionally intrusive. But that imperfection is its charm. It’s alive. It asks you to lean in, to apologise for blocking someone’s view, to navigate the messy intersections of art and life.

And maybe that’s the point. In a world that too often compartmentalises—art here, music there, beer somewhere else—the brewery insists on overlap, on collision, on improvisation. Like a jazz solo, it’s never quite the same twice.