Barbara Winkelstein was a prolific and lauded professional portrait painter, known for capturing the essence of her subjects with warmth and insight. Her work has been shown at various galleries in San Francisco, CA, and graces the homes of her many clients worldwide.

This site focuses on work from her later years, when she shared a Pier 70 studio with a close group of women artists who gathered there to paint portraits of live models using gouache, charcoal, graphite, oil stick and watercolor. 

She also painted many watercolors of the California landscapes she loved, including Stinson Beach, Tennessee Valley, and Echo Lake. 

Barbara had an ability to experience and understand people and places in deep and honest ways – this was more than vision, it included empathy, curiosity and perceptiveness. This contributed to her amazing ability to convey, sometimes in just a few gestures, the true feeling of a place or character of a person.  In Barbara’s artwork there is a kind of magic in the way she always was able to capture and express something essential in each of her subjects. This came from the heart, from the way she lived in the world and connected with people.

Born in Coalinga, California, she lived in Venezuela and Colorado before earning her BA at the University of Oregon, in 1950. She moved to San Francisco in 1956, where she met and married architect Peter Winkelstein. She died in November 2011.