Peter Seitz Adams (born August 27, 1950, Los Angeles) is an American artist. 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. He is noted for his colorful, high-key palette and broad brushwork. 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. Adams is the longest serving President of the California Art Club (f. 1909) and has served on its board of directors in Pasadena, California from 1993 to 2018. 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.
Family and personal background
Peter Adams' mother, Mary Seitz Adams (1917–2004), was a socially active homemaker and his father, James H. Adams, also known as Peter Adams, Sr., was a businessman by vocation, and an actor by avocation. Peter Adams, Sr. appeared in Hollywood epic films, such as Bullwhip, Omar Khayyam, The Big Fisherman, Jailhouse Rock and the television series Zorro. His maternal grandfather was the playwright and Hollywood movie director George B. Seitz (1888–1944). Adams has two older sisters, Mary Adams O’Connell, who is a businesswoman and Aileen Adams Cowan, who is a former Secretary of State for Consumer Affairs for the State of California and an Assistant Attorney General in the Clinton Administration. Adams grew up in Beverly Hills and attended Harvard Boys School (now Harvard-Westlake School). He is married to Elaine Shelby (Shelbi) Adams, a former stockbroker who has managed the California Art Club in addition to Adams' career since 1993. The Adams' live in a home that has been described as an eclectic mixture of Chinese furniture and Antiques, some significant works by his teacher Theodore Lukits as well as a broad selection of some of his own works chosen by his wife. 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 is a public speaker and raconteur.
Early art studies
Adams was initially drawn to traditional, representational art. As a young man, he collected adventure books from the "Golden Age" of American illustration. 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 wanted to learn how to paint like the turn-of-the-century painters did, but he couldn't keep up with the curriculum at the Instituto de Bellas Artes in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico (1969), Otis Art Institute and Art Center School (1970). In 1970 he was introduced to Theodore Lukits (1897–1992), a well-known painter of portraits, still lifes and landscapes who had been teaching in Los Angeles since 1924.