Watch a city from the sky. The municipality below you is made of buildings, among which some are tall, some are low; some are modern, some are old. Some are decorated, some are essential architecture.
Monuments, antennas, belltowers and churches dot the panorama.
Parks, gardens, open spaces, rivers, avenues, narrow alleys and shorelines trace lines over it... Study the panorama during three minutes.
Now, go back to the ground level and start reproducing - on a piece of paper - what you've seen, changing perspective, as if what you saw, had been straight in front of you and not below you.
How many buildings would you be able to reproduce?
For those like me who can't flip two cards in a memory game and can't remember what was for dinner the day before or, even worse, the name of the person they were just introduced to...Stephen Wiltshire is a kind of prodigy. You look at him - as when as a woman you look at a skinny one and think "gosh, why? Couldn't she have some of my weight?" - and realize that - for sure - in this case you would like to have some of his memory, considered that he has more than a camcorder, more than a TeraByte disk and...
Well, it is not over: he is gifted twice, considered that he can draw extremely well.
Stephen drawing the Tokyo Skyline, image courtesy of Stephen Wiltshire GalleryYes. Stephen Wiltshire is a genius of one kind. He looks at things and reproduces them as they are, just after a few minutes. The panoramas he draws are full of details, as accurate as a panoramic image taken with a Nikon. Moreover, they are full of buildings (and I talk about hundreds!), no detail is left to the occurrence and the city skyline materializes in front of him, under his pencil, with whatever there is. And yes, once he's over with the task, you will want to check, because you can't understand why on Earth!... you had never noticed that construction before (which actually was there).
Stephen Wiltshire started to draw when he was young. Autistic, he has always been passionate about drawing and his first words, as soon as he could mutter them at the age of nine, were "paper and pencil". Overly talented, he was named in 2006 Member of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II, as a recognition of the services to the art. Since then, he has painted Tokyo, Frankfurt, Rome and Hong Kong on giant canvasses which are 10 meters long, respecting everytime the details, the position and the proportions.
So said, do not worry if your camera doesn't grab all the details that Wiltshire - on the contrary - will. Geniuses aren't batches...
Links:
Stephen Wiltshire Gallery
