Video: Stunning new work by Stephen Wiltshire, an artist with a phenomenal memory
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
British artist Stephen Wiltshire became world famous for his amazing ability to reproduce in detail the cityscapes he saw only once from memory. “I can look at something and then go to another place and transfer all these lines, shapes, arches to paper,” explains the artist.
At the age of three, he was diagnosed with autism, or rather, savant syndrome. This is a rare condition in which a person can exhibit amazing abilities in one or more areas of knowledge, have a phenomenal memory and have a heightened sense of time, while social interaction and communication can be seriously impaired.
At the age of five, the boy was enrolled in the Queensmill School for children with disabilities in West London. It was there that his amazing talent was first discovered. Wiltshire still did not speak, was withdrawn and often fell into hysterical states, but the teachers noticed that the child could and wants to communicate, but only through drawings. Over time, they came up with a way to nudge the boy into dialogue. By deliberately taking away the drawing supplies from him, they achieved that whenever the boy wanted to draw, he shouted: "paper!"
In 1987, the BBC documentary "The Foolish Wise Ones" was released, which focused on savant syndrome. One of the episodes of the film was about a boy who reproduced the complex London architecture on paper with amazing accuracy. It was Steven Wiltshire, twelve years old. Hugh Casson, a brilliant architect, designer and art critic, called Wiltshire "the best young artist in Great Britain" at the time.
Wiltshire is one of the most famous British painters today. In 2005, after a half-hour helicopter trip over Tokyo, for seven days he recreated from memory a panorama of the city, which would fit on a sixteen-meter canvas. Since then, he has managed to capture impressive panoramas of Rome, Jerusalem, Hong Kong, Frankfurt, Madrid and other cities of the world. In 2006, Stephen Wiltshire became a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for Services to the Arts. Earlier works by the artist can be viewed here.
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An artist with a phenomenal memory
Briton Stephen Wiltshire is quite an unusual person with autism, but at the same time he is just a genius artist, with a phenomenal memory that helps him to reproduce on canvas the paintings he has taken away to the smallest details
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