He grew up spending the summers with his family on Great Cranberry Island, Maine, and attended Cooper Union art school in New York City, where he studied with Rueben Kadish and Nick Marsicano.
[1] In 1983 he received an MFA from Yale School of Art, and has taught at the National Academy of Design since 1996.
[3] Finkelstein has attributed his interest in color to a childhood visit to France.
I never left that, really.”[4] Although he works from life, Finkelstein is influenced especially by painters of the Abstract Expressionism movement.
[6] Among the awards he's received are a Fulbright Fellowship for Painting in Italy in 1983, the Julius Hallgarten Prize at the National Academy, and a French government grant.