NEW YORK.- The Museum of the City of New York presents the exhibit New York Creative: Portraits by Everett Raymond Kinstler through September 15. Everett Raymond Kinstler is one of America’s most sought-after portrait painters, conveying both the spirit and the likeness of his subjects by means of extraordinary technical facility and keen observation of character. New York Creative: Portraits by Everett Raymond Kinstler focuses on one remarkable segment of Kinstler’s body of work: his interpretations of celebrated figures from the world of arts & letters in New York. Fifty oil paintings, watercolors, pastels, and charcoal sketches of such cultural luminaries as artists Will Barnet and Jacob Lawrence, writers Tom Wolfe and Arthur Miller, and performers Tony Bennett and Paul Newman will be on view.

Everett Raymond Kinstler is a native New Yorker who began his career at age 16, drawing comic books and hundreds of book and magazine illustrations, as well as covers for paper back books. As one of the "golden age" era of comic book artists, his illustrations for magazines, including The Shadow and Doc Savage, have influenced the pop art school.

He studied at the Art Students League, where he later taught from 1969 to 1974. Kinstler ultimately made the transition to portraitist, and soon established himself as one of the nation's foremost portrait painters. For over four decades, Kinstler also has devoted time to painting landscapes and watercolors.

Among Kinstler's more than 500 portraits are such well-known personalities as Tony Bennett, Carol Burnett, Peter O'Toole, James Cagney, Betty Ford, Gene Hackman, Katharine Hepburn, Lady Bird Johnson, Paul Newman, Gregory Peck and John Wayne. Others include authors Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Tom Wolfe; Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Harry Blackmun; Business leaders such as John D.Rockefeller III; Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan; six U.S.Governors; four US Secretaries of State; and the presidents of universities and colleges including Brown, Harvard, Princeton, Smith, Wellesley, Williams andYale.

Kinstler has painted more than 40 cabinet officers, more than any artist in the country's history. Five Presidents -- Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George Bush and Bill Clinton -- have posed for him. His portraits of Ford and Reagan are the official White House portraits.

He was awarded honorary doctorates by Rollins College in 1983, and the Lyme Academy College of Art in 2002. The National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C., acquired 50 of his original works for its permanent collection. He is also represented in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Butler Institute of American Art, Brooklyn Museum, etc.