He is a recipient of the John Singleton Copley Medal, the highest and most prestigious portrait award bestowed by the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery which possesses more than fifty of his paintings in its permanent collection.  His work is also represented at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and at the Brooklyn Museum.

Although he has been described as "the John Singer Sargent of our time," Kinstler resists the implication that he is a "portrait painter."  "I'm an artist who enjoys painting people," he says, but he is not limited to oil portraits.  He also paints landscapes and figures and works in other media as well as oil.