Known as a person with great abilities and disabilities at the same time, autistic artist Stephen Wiltshire can draw highly detailed scenes after just a brief glance.
Diagnosed with autism at age three, Stephen has faced many difficulties, including speech development which he couldn`t fully achieve until he was 9 years old. However, Stephen could sketch stunningly accurate images of wildlife and caricatures of his teachers. Only at the age of 13 he published his first book of drawings in Great Britain.
The sketching of buildings and cities are so detailed that it seems almost impossible to be drawn solely out of the memory of a brief glance. But Stephen has more than once proved his extraordinary abilities.
The BBC’s popular science documentary T.V. series, Q.E.D., featured an 11-year-old Stephen Wiltshire in a 1987 broadcast on autistic savants. To test his skills, the show took him to a building he’d never seen before — the ornate, Victorian-era St. Pancras train station in central London — and had him draw it from memory later that day.
In 1989, he visited Venice and drew his first panorama. From then on, Stephen became known for his incredibly detailed cityscapes, each done from memory with hundreds of streets, landmarks, and other minutia in perfect scale. He drew cities around the world, from Jerusalem to Sydney.
In New York, he took a 20-minute helicopter ride and then sketched everything he saw of the Manhattan skyline onto a 19-foot-long piece of paper. The process of drawing of the skyline was live-streamed for viewers via webcam. The sketch is now placed in JFK airport.
Today, Stephen is well-known, not only in Britain but all over the world. He spends most of his time sketching skylines. He usually takes a short helicopter ride over his subject, taking in the important parts and gauging the size of the site. Then, he spends five to ten days sketching it on a giant canvas.
Source: All That Is Interesting , National Geographic
