‘A homage to St Davids’: artist aims to paint everyone in Britain’s smallest city

‘A homage to St Davids’: artist aims to paint everyone in Britain’s smallest city
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‘A homage to St Davids’: artist aims to paint everyone in Britain’s smallest city
Author: Steven Morris
Published: Feb, 28 2025 07:00

Summary at a Glance

So far artist Grahame Hurd-Wood has painted 1,000 portraits and this week he loaded them into his VW van and took them to Cardiff, where they are being shown together for the first time from Saturday, which, appropriately, is St David’s Day.

City of Portraits, a decade in the making, celebrates tightknit community in tiny Welsh city.

City of Portraits has sad beginnings, dating back to when Hurd-Wood’s fiancee, Debbie Best, who had cancer, asked him to paint her portrait.

Hurd-Wood does other work, including landscapes, but realises that the natural fluctuations of population means City of Portraits will never be complete and that 1,800 mark is notional.

As he hung the pictures in a sun-dappled room overlooking Cardiff Bay, Hurd-Wood pointed out to the Guardian some of the characters that had sat for him, including a butcher, a skateboarder and the Bishop of St Davids, the Right Rev Dorrien Davies.

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