"Stephen's drawings had a perceptual fidelity, a mechanical fidelity, which was
stunning; but over and above this, they hinted at a delightful, very human
personality and style. One had to wonder what would happen to him: would he
simply continue, repertorially in the same way? Would he - like Nadia, a
prodigious autistic artist, who drew Picasso-like footballers and bullfighters
when she was three - learn to talk, to 'interact' and would this lead to the
vanishing of this strange gift? Or - the most exciting possibility of them all
- might he go on to a real, creative expansion and development?"
"The combination of great abilities with great disabilities presents an
extraordinary (and, in human terms, poignant) paradox and problem - how can
such opposites live side by side? There is a strong tendency to see these as
organically related - to see the gifts of the autistic (and about 10% of these
are so gifted) as stemming directly from their failures and deficits - their
narrow 'hyperfocused' attention, and their supposed inability to process visual
information, to pass from precepts to concepts, so that, in the visual realm,
for example, it has been said that they merely 'see' what is there..."
"...Is Stephen no more than a sort of wonderful human camera? The great
Cambridge psychologist Frederic Bartlett made a lifetime's study of
remembering-he would never speak of 'memory', always of 'remembering' - and
always depicted it as personal and active, never as mechanical and passive..."
(Dr Oliver Sacks, Stephen Wiltshire: Cities, 1989)
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