Yet another autistic prodidgy

[BaalChatzaf]

Stephen Wiltshire has literally photographic memory. He can paint or draw accurate cityscapes after a brief viewing from the air.

See:

http://www.stephenwiltshire.co.uk/

See also:

http://www.odditycentral.com/pics/stephen-wiltshireautistic-artistknown-as-the-human-camera.html

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Max Eichelberger]

I understand the ability, but the questions that jump to the front of my mind are: is he better than other artists (even if they take longer, and need to view the landscape longer)? And, is he offering a service that is better than a camera (a question I pose to all non-Dutch landscape painters)?

Isn't there the consideration that he is not applying any, how would one say... Morality?... Onto his paintings.

[Dragonfly]

I understand the ability, but the questions that jump to the front of my mind are: is he better than other artists (even if they take longer, and need to view the landscape longer)? And, is he offering a service that is better than a camera (a question I pose to all non-Dutch landscape painters)?

I hope others may reply too...

I wonder how accurate the drawings really are, I'd like to see for example a comparison between a photo and the drawing of the same buildings. Some years ago I saw on Dutch television a similar savant (it could even have been the same person, but I'm not sure). They showed how he looked for a few minutes at the Cathedral Tower in Utrecht and then made a drawing from memory of the same tower. Although my visual memory is not very good, I think I could have repeated that performance with no worse results. His drawing looked detailed, but although the main structure was more or less correctly drawn, he had also fantasized quite some details. It looks quite impressive if you have no direct comparison, as it seems that he has remembered all those details, but if you compared it with the original, the result was much less striking.

It's not quite clear to me how the large drawing in the link was made. They write that he drew from memory after a 20 minutes flight with a helicopter over the city. However, on the 3rd photo we see him sketching buildings directly from some high building which offers a similar view of the city as in the drawing, so I wonder how much in the large drawing was really done from memory alone.