Photo: Piotr Redlinski for The New York Times
Diagnosed with autism at an early age, artist Stephen Wiltshire has been at the Pratt Institute since Monday drawing the entire New York City skyline — all 305 square miles of it — by memory. Stephen has the ability to remember things with incredibly detail and he can recall things like the number of columns on a building or the number of windows on a building (multiply this by several hundred buildings and you get a sense of how awesome Stephen is). Wiltshire, who has been featured in a number of TV documentaries about people with incredible talents because of their autism, has already drawn several other cities by memory.
To get a view of NYC, Wiltshire flew over the city in a helicopter just once and then started drawing at a public gallery space at Pratt on Monday. He hopes to finish the entire panoramic drawing by this Friday. If you want to keep up with Stephen’s progress, CBS News has a live feed of his public studio gallery where he is working from. See the live feed below.
