Stephen Wiltshire: Love at first sight
Stephen Wiltshire sees and draws. It is how he connects. Until age 5, he had never uttered a word. One day, his kindergarten class at a school for autisticchildren in London went on a field trip.
When they came back, he spoke.
“He said, ‘Paper,’ ” his sister, Annette Wiltshire, said. “The teacher asked him to say it again. He said it. Then they asked him to say something else, and he said, ‘Pen.’ ”
With pen and paper in hand, he drew what he had seen that day. In time, a clever teacher taught him the alphabet by associating each letter with a place he had drawn — “a” for Albert Hall, “b” for Buckingham Palace, and so on.
Later he began drawing the buildings he was seeing around London with impressive detail. His older sister Annette would take him to the home of a school friend who lived on the 14th floor of an apartment building, so he could see a sprawling view of the city. He marveled at its layout and landmarks. From that point on, she says, “his passion became obsessive.”
He works rapidly, with headphones in, his pencil skimming the surface of the canvas (some of the larger panoramic canvases are curved and span 13ft), and using the finger of his other hand for perspective. He then goes over the sketches in pen, filling in the details of the buildings, and a city emerges before your eyes.
Stephen Wiltshire & New York City — Love at first sight
Of New York — his “spiritual home” — he says: “I love the chaos and the order of the city at the same time, the rush hour traffic v the square avenues.” He is drawn to New York by its scale. “The enormous skyscrapers,” he said. “The yellow cabs. The American police.”
What about the police?
“I always saw them on TV and in the movies,” he said. His Web site includes pictures of him with a New York police officer.
In October 2017 Stephen Wiltshire took a 45-minute helicopter ride and then sketched everything he saw onto a 19-foot-long piece of paper as viewers watched live via webcam. He began working on the drawing on October 11, and worked almost non-stop for five days. The finished product, which is the roughly the size of a large gallery wall, was done in just pen and pencil and shows the buildings of Manhattan in pristine detail.
And though it was done on a flat surface, the level of detail and expansive panoramic view by which he captures the city makes the viewer feel as if they too are looking at the photos from a helicopter.
See more of Stephen Wiltshire amazing art below:
©Stephen Wiltshire
©Stephen Wiltshire
©Stephen Wiltshire
©Stephen Wiltshire
©Stephen Wiltshire
©Stephen Wiltshire
©Stephen Wiltshire
©Stephen Wiltshire
©Stephen Wiltshire
©Stephen Wiltshire
©Stephen Wiltshire
©Stephen Wiltshire
©Stephen Wiltshire