His body of work focuses on landscapes and seascapes created en plein air in oil or pastel as well as enigmatic figure and still-life paintings.
Adams has held numerous solo and group exhibitions in galleries and museums, including throughout California, the Western United States, and on the East Coast in Philadelphia, Vermont, and New York.
He is also a writer on subjects relating to historic artists for the California Art Club Newsletter, as well as for a number of the organization's exhibition catalogs.
Peter Adams, Sr. appeared in Hollywood epic films, such as Bullwhip, Omar Khayyam, The Big Fisherman, Jailhouse Rock and the television series Zorro.
[7] The Adams have constructed elaborate waterfalls and pools, as well as walls and walkways made of river stones around their Pasadena property.
Peter Adams' studio features a high-pitched roof that allows him to work on large paintings and glassed shelves housing a collection of art books.
He is an avid outdoorsman who hikes in the San Gabriel Mountains with his border collies and makes painting trips to the Sierra Nevada (U.S.).
He credits these romantic tales, illustrated by artists like Howard Pyle, N.C. Wyeth and Dean Cornwell, with not only inspiring his art but interesting him in the world beyond the shores of America.
Adams participated in a number of pastel shows along with Solliday, Karl, Gil Dellinger, Rich Hilker and Clark Mitchell.
[17] Early in his career, his work consisted of Plein Air pastels and oils of the Eucalyptus trees, bridges and foothills around Pasadena.
Art historian and former Chief Curator of the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, Michael Tomor, described Adams' pastel work in an essay for the exhibition Contemporary Romanticism: Landscapes in Pastel as being "Inspired by the brilliant colors, atmospheric perspective, and scenic grandeur of the great 19th century Romanticists, Peter Adams, a student of Theodore Lukits in the 1970s, conveys the magical shimmer of light in ephemeral sunsets and the tranquility of the sea.
As he reached middle age, Adams began to do large works of unusual natural formations, geysers and pools in Yellowstone National Park or stalactites in Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico.
[21] By the early 1990s, Adams and his friends saw the need for an organization that could help to bring order to the reemerging traditional art movement in California.
In order to reorganize the California Art Club, Adams began to recruit most of the active professional landscape and figurative painters and sculptors that he knew.
The core group of artists that became members of the reorganized California Art Club was primarily students of Theodore Lukits or the Russian landscape and figurative painter Sergei Bongart (1918–1985).
The exhibition, organized and curated by the Weisman's Michael Zakian, ran from May 22 to August 7, featuring the work of Adams along with dozens of CAC painters.
In addition to his affiliation with the California Art Club, Adams has served on the boards of the American Society of Classical Realism, American Society of Portrait Artists, and served several years on the board of directors of the Pacific Asia Museum and the Pasadena Museum of California Art.