A TELEVISION crew from BBC’s The One Show was in St Davids last week to meet a local artist.

Radio and television presenter Andy Kershaw caught up with Grahame Hurd-Wood, who is in the middle of an ambitious project to paint portraits of every person living in St Davids.

So far Grahame has painted somewhere between 300-400 of the 1,800 portraits and he thinks it will take him up to 10 years to complete.

The small portraits can take Grahame anything from 30 minutes up to five hours to complete, depending on the subject.

Grahame said: “I feel quite nervous initially doing the portraits but the people are intrigued and like to see themselves painted."

After spending the day with Grahame filming, Andy said: “Grahame is great. He’s a dotty, eccentric English artist operating here in Wales.

“The ambition of his mission here is slightly crazy, but also very generously spirited.

“Even though I have only been here 24 hours, you can see his project has had a powerful effect on pulling the community together. Everybody seems to be terribly excited by it and everybody has got to know each other better.”

On Thursday, August 7 The One Show held its very own challenge inspired by Grahame.

The producers pulled together a number of local artists and invited the people of St Davids to come down to the Goat Street Gallery to sit for their portraits.

Andy explains: "Taking inspiration from Grahame’s lunatic project, we want to see how many people we can get done in a day.”

Speaking about his role as a reporter with the show, Andy added: “What I like about The One Show is that it casts such a wide net. It’s the only magazine programme on television at the moment.

“When they ring me up and ask me to do a story it could be about anything. As long as it’s a good story, the instinctive journalist in me says let’s do it. No two days are the same and you can’t ask for anything more.”

The feature on Grahame and the challenge will be aired on The One Show later this year. A date has yet to be confirmed.