Artistic metaphors

Anna Zemánková (23 August 1908 – 15 January 1986) was a Czech painter. Had no formal art training and is therefore considered a classic representative of Art Brut. Her work looks like an herbarium of fantastic alien plants or unknown underwater flora and fauna. The technical skill and precision that she developed as a dentist also played an important role in her work.[14] Her drawings are not reflections of concrete nature, but rather artistic metaphors and "messengers of other worlds and projections of other levels of knowledge." Zemánková is an architect of new nature and a designer of new shapes that give the impression that they are not meant to be merely viewed, but are made to be read or deciphered. At the age of fifty-two, she started creating "swirling, luminous drawings" which evolved into a "repertoire of abstracted floral and insectlike forms set against flat, softly atmospheric backgrounds. The strange rhythm contained in the drawings is influenced by music as its supporting and unifying structure. Zemánková herself once said "I grow flowers that grow nowhere else", but her work is so surreal and disturbing precisely because in the debauchery of shapes and colours the original motif loses its meaning and something elusive emerges.