https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8YXZTlwTAU

Diagnosed with autism at 3, Stephen Wiltshire quickly became fascinated with drawing London buildings, and by age 8 he was sketching Salisbury Cathedral for former Prime Minister Edward Heath. Known as “the living camera,” he can draw an accurate, detailed picture of a subject after seeing it once — including subjects as complex as major cities. He’s completed enormous canvases of Tokyo, Rome, Hong Kong, Frankfurt, Madrid, Dubai, Jerusalem, and London, drawing each from memory after a helicopter ride.

Below is the full time-lapse of his portrait of Singapore, drawn from memory over five days in 2014. “That he has a gift makes no sense at all to Stephen,” his sister Annette told the New York Times. “He knows that he draws very well, but he picks that up from other people — he sees the warmth on their faces, they tell him how much they like his work, and that makes him very happy. He loves the attention.”

Artist Akinori Goto created this 3D-printed zoetrope, a rotating design that produces an animation when illuminated with a slice of light.

It won both the Runner-up Grand Prix and the Audience Award at the 2016 Spiral Independent Creators Festival in Tokyo.

He followed it up with “Ballet”:

After each of his victories as a matador, John Fulton would paint a portrait of the bull he had slain using its own blood, after the manner of the hunter-painters who had decorated the cave walls of Altamira.

Fulton grew up in a Philadelphia rowhouse but became captivated by the bullring after seeing the 1941 Tyrone Power film Blood and Sand. “The movie so stirred his sense of gallantry and romance that he decided on the spot to become a bullfighter,” reported the New York Times. “If a Rita Hayworth was the reward, he told friends years later, it was worth the effort and the risk.”

He spent a year at the Philadelphia Museum College of Art, won a scholarship to a Mexican art school, and began to study bullfighting. In 1956 he went to Spain, where he became the first American to qualify as a matador and spent 40 years fighting professionally in the ring.

The paintings were decidedly a sideline, as he regarded bullfighting itself as an art. “It is the most difficult art form in the world,” he once said. “You are required to create a work of art spontaneously with a semi-unknown medium, which can kill you, in front of one of the most critical audiences around. And it all leaves only a memory.”

Tourists traveling the Pan-American Highway can be startled to discover an enormous human hand emerging from the Atacama Desert in Chile. The 36-foot sculpture is Mano del Desierto, installed by artist Mario Irarrázabal in 1992.

A thousand miles away, in the Uruguayan seaside town of Punta del Este, lies La Mano de Punta del Este, completed by Irarrázabal 10 years earlier. One is a left hand, the other a right.

American artist J. Seward Johnson Jr. finished The Awakening (below) at Hains Point near Washington, D.C., in 1980, and a copy near Chesterfield, Mo., in 2009. What’s next?

Reader John Kelleher found this letter in the University of Illinois archives — in 1921 instrument maker Elden E. Benge had written to cornet soloist Herbert L. Clarke asking whether there was any future in the trumpet:

(From The Sousa Archives. Thanks, John.)