The statistics on file at the Citizens Advice Bureau in Watford may not sound like the obvious starting point for an art project, but that is exactly where local artist Adrian Rose got the idea for his latest exhibition, Cosmopolis.

“Working as a volunteer statistician for the Citizens Advice Bureau after I’d retired gave me the idea for a project for a demographic of Watford based on portraits,“ says Adrian, who used to work in project management and who has been painting all his life as a hobby. “The idea was a histogram made up of individual portraits representing age, sex, ethnicity etc, but it soon became obvious that this was hugely over ambitious and impractical!“ Instead, Adrian has produced a far more accessible series of portraits of people he has met in Watford over the course of two years, with an emphasis on different nationalities, and now he is exhibiting 24 of his 43 works at Watford Museum. Twenty-two of them are fine pencil portraits, and there are two larger watercolours – one a panorama of the high street and the other of Watford skaters on the ice rink that was on the high street over Christmas.

“The purpose is to reflect the cosmopolitan nature of Watford,“ continues Adrian, who is white British and has lived in the town since the late 1990s. “It’s the most ‘nationality diverse’ town in Hertfordshire – about 28 per cent of the population is non-white, which is higher than the Herts average of about 16 per cent.

“Doing the drawings and meeting the people has been a real pleasure.“

  • Cosmopolis is at Watford Museum, Lower High Street, Watford, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays in January. Details: 01923 232297, watfordmuseum.org.uk