Miriam Escofet
Born in 1967 is a Spanish portrait painter and skilled in Art, Fine Art, Drawing, Figure Drawing, Perspective Drawing, Teaching, Photography, Ceramic, Book design, and Contemporary Art. Escofet lives and is currently working in London, Greater London, United Kingdom. Miriam Escofet was born in 1967 in Barcelona, she moved to the United Kingdom in 1979. Escofet grew up in a home of artists and art. She studied 3D Design at the Brighton School of Art and graduated in 1991. Her painting career began soon after graduating and she has been working as an artist ever since. Escofet is fluent in three languages; Spanish, Catalan, and English. She is the daughter of Jose Escofet. She currently spends her time teaching master art and painting portraits, classes.
Revolving around ideas of classical allegory and symbolism, Escofet is renowned for portraiture, earning the BP Portrait Award in 2018 with her incredible piece, An Angel at My Table. The painting shows Escofet's elderly mother sat at her kitchen table surrounded by tea crockery. It suggests a sense of space, perspective and time which conveys the sitter's inner stillness and calm. Escofet says she was conscious whilst painting that she wanted to 'transmit an idea of the Universal Mother, who is at the centre of our psyche and emotional world.' "An Angel at my Table" shows the artist’s mother at her kitchen table surrounded by crockery.
This is the fifth time Escofet has been selected for the BP Portrait Award exhibition (previously in 2007, 2009, 2010 and 2012.) She has also been regularly selected for The Royal Society of Portrait Painters annual exhibitions and was awarded the Burke's Peerage Foundation Prize for Classically Inspired Portraiture in 2015.
She describes her method of work : "I have arrived at portraiture after many years of painting varied subject matter; working from life, from photographic references and from imagination. I aim for spatial and psychological depth in my portraits, as well as an aesthetically successful composition. I can work from sittings or from photographs, ideally a combination of both. For practical reasons I take many photographic references as the level of detail and technique which I use means I spend months on every canvas, so it would be unrealistic to expect that time commitment form the sitter."