Buildings, cities, landscapes – nothing is safe from him. Everything is drawn. The Briton Stephen Wiltshire was born in London in 1974 and has lagged behind other children in his development. At the age of three he was diagnosed as having autism. Two years later, at the age of five, Stephen was found to have an above-average penchant for drawing. It was a way of communicating for him until he finally learned to speak at the age of nine.
In 1987 Wiltshire came into contact with literary agent Margaret Hewson. Fascinated by his passion, she arranged for him to study at the highly respected City and Guilds of London Art college where he studied drawing and painting. Today the autistic artist is known under the nickname “living camera” and his cityscapes, such as those of Tokyo, Frankfurt, Dubai, London and New York, are world famous.
Once Stephen Wiltshire has seen buildings, cities or landscapes, he brings even the most complex impressions to paper from memory, true to detail. In this way, for example, after a helicopter tour of several minutes, he drew entire panorama pictures of cities on gigantic canvases that did not lack a window or a chimney. This was also the case in the spring of 2011, when Wiltshire flew a helicopter over Manhattan for the UBS “We will not rest” campaign and then sketched the world’s largest metropolis completely from memory.
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