By Sona Schmidt-Harris | [email protected]

An opening reception for Chris Haggqvist’s “Tiny Portraits, Big Connections” exhibit will be held August 1, 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. at Holladay City Hall.

The exhibit will consist of 100 tiny portraits of mostly friends and family of Haggqvist. He also reached out on Instagram and asked if people were interested in letting him draw them.

Haggqvist posted many of his portraits on Instagram as the project progressed and provided his followers with an unfolding process of the artist. 

“It’s a project I just started because I wanted to do something every day for 100 days,” Haggqvist said.

He added that it was a bit stressful trying to finish a portrait every day.

All portraits are 4" x 4".

Haggqvist describes his portraiture style as “realistic-ish.” Most of the individuals are easily identifiable. “The people that I knew, I tried to capture their essence — what they meant to me at least.”  

“They are all very different,” he said.

Haggqvist has been an artist for 30 years. He is drawn to portraiture, particularly people’s eyes.  “Everyone’s eyes are a little bit different,” he said.

He feels it is more difficult to create small portraits than larger ones. It has led to him drawing miniature landscapes and other tiny images.

He describes his style as “very graphic, an illustration style mostly,” with a lot of hard lines, and “very heavy-edged graphic design.” He noted that he also mixes some softness with it too.  

However, within the 100 tiny portraits, they are quite stylistically different from one another.

Mediums used include pen and ink, a few oil paintings, several acrylic paintings, watercolors, wash paintings, charcoal sketches, paper collage and pastels.

The artist hopes many of his subjects will attend the opening.

The exhibit will be on display until Aug. 30.  

Holladay City Hall is located at 4580 South 2300 East in Holladay.