This guy has a really incredible ability and talent.....
Some people may well of heard about him, his name is Stephen Wiltshire aged 37 from London and he is an architectural artist.
Stephen also happens to be autistic and is specifically known as a Savant. Savants are people much like the character Dustin Hoffman plays in the film 'Rainman' ... i.e. someone with a neurodevelopmental disorder who have a far than above average ability in a specific skill or skills.
For Rainman it was his ability to count cards and toothpicks in a casino and to only want to fly with Qantas Airlines, as they were the most statistically safe in the world.
With Stephen he is known for his ability to draw from memory a landscape after seeing it just once!
Now, we aren't just talking about painting a desert landscape with a couple of cacti and some tumble weeds knocking about.... no, Stephen likes to stretch his limits a lot more than that and goes for vast challenging city vistas.
He will take a good look at the scene once and then go away sometimes for days at end to sketch them out. After he is done and they are compared to the real life counterparts they are frighteningly accurate, even down to the last details of the windows on the buildings.
In 2006, Wiltshire was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for services to art, and he also opened a permanent gallery on the Royal Opera Arcade in London, somewhere I need to go check out I think.
Here is a video of him doing his magic and a link to his website....
http://www.stephenwiltshire.co.uk/
