From a distance, they look like vivid pieces of abstract art – but move a little closer and dozens of small, characterful portraits shine out of the work.

The ambitious idea of the City of Portraits (Dinas Portreadau) project, a decade in the making and nowhere near complete, is to record the faces of all 1,800 people who live in Britain’s smallest city, St Davids in south-west Wales.

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.

“It has been a big undertaking,” said Hurd-Wood. “But it’s turned out to be a joyful celebration of a tightknit community, of all the people in my life, people who have been there for me.”

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.

The staff of the Mill cafe (“my second home”) are here, as are shopkeepers, a children’s sports team, a Welsh international rugby player, a writer, a festival organiser.

It is not all joy. 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. He did not complete the painting until after Best, also an artist, died.

But she had told him to make sure he kept on painting portraits when she had gone. He honoured her wish and set about trying to capture everyone in St Davids.

“The project evolved into a homage to St Davids and the community of individuals who call it home. Each portrait is an attempt to catch the essence of the person in front of me,” he said.

It has also helped him cope with loss. “It’s not just about Debbie, it’s about my mother and my father and my sister. We all suffer from loss. I dealt with it by doing these portraits.”

He prefers subjects to come and sit for their portraits. Covid meant he had to paint from photographs, too. “But it’s better if they come and sit.”

There is no particular system for gathering his sitters. “When I meet people, I tell them: ‘Make sure you come and sit for a portrait’ and usually they do.”

As word of the project spread, people came to him – including many who do not live in the city itself but in the wider area. People ask him: “Do I count?” He tells them they do – the project is not restricted by cursory city boundaries.

The portraits are painted in oils or acrylics and 35 faces are assembled on each one-metre squared grid. He does not know how many are men and women – he hasn’t thought to count.

There is no mini picture yet of Best, though the larger one he did of her is in the show. And there is no self-portrait. “I’d like someone else to paint me – perhaps David Hockney.”

Hurd-Wood studied in London and his work has taken him across the world but he settled in St Davids four decades ago.

The show in Cardiff is sponsored by the Welsh first minister, Eluned Morgan, who has family in the area going back generations. Morgan features in the work, as do some of her relatives.

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. “I’m not going to stop doing them. There’s a lifetime of work in this.”

• The City of Portraits project can be seen at the Pierhead Futures Gallery in Cardiff Bay from 1 March until 12 April.