Collection: Gloria Escoffery

Gloria Escoffery was born in 1923 in Gayle, St Mary, Jamaica. Her father was a government medical officer and her mother was a professional violinist and Bridge champion. She is one of Jamaica’s most outstanding painters, her work first coming to notice in the 1940s. Her paintings of rural Jamaican life are particularly well known, with strong sympathies for grass-roots people, though there is nothing sentimental in her work, which has strong surreal, non-figurative elements. She is also an important art critic, with scores of articles in Jamaica Journal over the years. She was awarded the Order of Distinction in 1977 and the Silver Musgrave medal in 1989 for her services in the field of art. She is a highly distinctive poet - unconventional, surreal and strongly visual in imagery. She has published Landscape in the Making (a pamphlet, 1976); Loggerhead (Sandberry Press, 1988) and Mother Jackson Murders the Moon (Peepal Tree, 1998). Sadly, Gloria Escoffery died in 2002 at the age of 78.