Here we have a large outsider art painting titled "Valentine," painted and signed by Jane in vain Winkelman, dated February 14, 1991, San Francisco, California. This one isn't decoration, it's a dispatch.
The scene is straight out of the Tenderloin: a hot pink vinyl booth lettered "THE TENDERLOIN" across the back, a platinum blonde in a bra and ruffled skirt perched on the armrest with one hand on a weathered man's shoulder and the other hand caught by a second man in rainbow striped trousers, a can of Cisco (the fortified wine notorious on hard luck corners everywhere) gripped in the seated man's fist, and a wild eyed spotted dog snarling at everyone's feet. Two more women hang back behind the booth, taking it all in. Up in the corner Winkelman painted a street sign reading "146 Leavenworth St. SF, CA." That address is not filler. It's the address of Hospitality House, the free community arts center where Winkelman, homeless and on her own in the Tenderloin at the time, first picked up a paintbrush. She put the building that made her an artist directly into a painting about the neighborhood that nearly broke her.
Winkelman earned her reputation the hard way. Born in 1949 on Long Island, she landed in the Bay Area by the late 1960s and ended up scraping by in the Tenderloin, painting what she saw around her, addiction, sex work, poverty, corruption, in vivid color and blunt hand lettered text. Critics have put her in the company of Bosch, Chagall, and Munch. Her work ran on the cover of Street Sheet, the Coalition on Homelessness' newspaper, landed her an Absolut Vodka ad commission in 1993, and now sits in the Smithsonian American Art Museum's collection. This piece, dated 1991, comes from right at the start of that run, before the ad campaign and the museum acquisitions, when she was still just a woman with a paintbrush documenting her own block. She passed away in 2012. What a life!
The paint goes on thick, the eyes on every face are wide and unblinking, and the whole thing still snaps with color decades later. It arrives already framed in black wood with a purple mat, wired and ready to hang.
The rare Winkelman painting comes out of the estate of a serious folk art collector.Â
The framed outsider art measures 34” x 26”.  The professional framing is rock solid. Please see all pics as they are part of the description.Â
I ship UPS fully insured to street addresses in the continental USA only (no PO Boxes). Free shipping on this rare outsider art.Â
What an epic artwork and life. Unreal
