[citation needed] In 1986 he attended printing classes at the Royal Academy while preparing his first one-man show in London with Piano Nobile Fine Paintings.
The following year, 2000, he was asked to paint portraits of six composers, whose operas were to be featured during the 2001 Glyndebourne Festival: Mozart, Beethoven, Verdi, Janáček, Britten and again Adam’s father, Sir Harrison.
Fascinated by ‘performers’ of all descriptions, his subjects vary from the astronomer, Sir Patrick Moore, and Winston Churchill, through to the actor Jeremy Irons and Dame Marjorie Scardino.
The cycle includes a triptych of arguably the three most significant American black civil rights activists, Marcus Garvey, Dr Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, along with race reversal portraits of the iconic faces of Marilyn Monroe, Jessye Norman, Charles Dickens, Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, Abraham Lincoln and Birtwistle's second take on Sir Winston Churchill though this time painted as he would have looked with black skin pigmentation.
"[6] Dr Charles Saumarez Smith, secretary and chief executive of the Royal Academy and formerly director of the National Gallery, regarded Adam Birtwistle as "one of the best of his generation" (*), while art critic Godfrey Barker called him "…one of our most distinguished portrait painters in what is, presently, a Golden Age of Portraiture in Britain.