Combining passions for MAN vehicles and drawing

Drawing trucks and driving are inextricably linked for Manni Noomen from the municipality of Leienkaul in the Eifel region of western Germany. It took a while before he was able to live out his passion for vehicles not just through drawing, but also behind the wheel of a truck.

Two things have fascinated Manni, who was born in the Netherlands, since he was a child – vehicles and painting. In his professional life, he initially gave preference to drawing in the 1980s and began training as an advertising painter. Everything was drawn by hand back in the day. However, soon afterwards computers came along and Manni, who had no interest in the new technology, decided not to pursue further training in his profession.

Instead, he switched his job behind a drawing table for a job at the port of Rotterdam. “I was surrounded by trucks and heavy-duty vehicles,” Manni still enthuses today. He worked his way up from a forklift driver to bigger and bigger forklifts and the stacker, a large forklift used to load containers onto trucks.

“Actually, I always wanted to be a truck driver.”

Manni reveals: “But then children and family came along and money was too tight to get a truck driving licence.” So, he continued to work as a warehouse clerk and forklift operator, while also continuing to draw. For a few years, he even ran his own tattoo studio.

Then his life circumstances brought about a key turning point. Manni and his family emigrated to Germany in 2010 and seven years later he lost his job and became unemployed. While this might sound quite dramatic, looking back, it helped Manni to move in the right direction. Since his Dutch diplomas and certificates were not recognised in Germany, the employment office advised him to retrain. When asked “what do you want to do?”, Manni answered quite spontaneously “drive trucks.” One week later, he started training as a professional driver.

In the meantime, Manni has been happily sitting behind the wheel of a truck for six years and currently works for Barth and drives a MAN TGS 18.500. A lot of his work is for road construction projects and he also drives snow removal vehicles in the winter. Over the years, he has been able to follow his passion for vehicles to quite a considerable degree – from driving tankers to roll-off skip loaders, refrigerated and tarpaulin semitrailers, as well as sea containers, he’s done a bit of everything. The 52-year-old particularly likes MAN vehicles. “They’re just lovely and comfortable vehicles,” he says.

For Manni, the fact that his childhood dream of driving a truck came true at the age of 45 is certainly one of the special events of his life so far. And just as you might like to capture special moments on camera, he also captures his love for big vehicles in his very special and personal drawings. We have put a selection of his artworks on display in the gallery.