Jiří Kornatovský (born 2 March 1952, Plasy, Czechoslovakia) is a Czech painter, draughtsman and printmaker. Life Jiri Kornatovsky’s artistic standpoint and life opinions were formed mostly by his childhood and youth spent in Plasy, where he roamed almost daily, until the age of 21, in an abandoned Cistercian monastery. After graduating from a technical teaching school in Pilsen, he studied at the College and High Art School of Vaclav Hollar in 1977-82, followed by the study of monumental painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague with professors Arnošt Paderlík and Jiří Ptáček (1982–87). At the end of the 1980s he published a number of spiritual manifestos and in 1991 he co-founded Hermit Foundation in the Cistercian monastery of Plasy. He created the Codes and Signs project at the international art symposium Hermit 92. In the following years he attended study and creative residences in the Carmelite monastery in Sejny, Poland (1992), in Florence (1993), New York City and Boston (1994-1995) and Hohenosig, Germany (1997). During his stay in the USA he held a series of exhibitions and lectures. In 2005 and 2006 he worked in the Augustinian monastery at the Lesser Quarter in Prague and again he visited the United States (Los Angeles). In the years 1998-99 he founded his own Gallery Hermit in Prague. He works as a university professor at the Charles University in Prague and at the Art and Design Faculty, University of West Bohemia in Pilsen. He lectured at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where he carried out the legendary Burning lecture. He introduced and defined the principle of his discovery of declarative drawing as a process method of artistic creation and the approach to it at a lecture in the Bachelard amphitheatre at the Sorbonne in Paris. He says about himself that he does not know where the artistic work begins and the presence of everyday reality ends. Meditation in the process of the linear layering of the structure of the painting is always present even without him striving for it. He perceives analysis and interpretation in art as negative fragmentation of the painting and disintegration of the character of the self. He reflects the aesthetics of St. Augustine mainly when it comes to integration and wholeness. Work Jiří Kornatovský is mostly known as an author of unique large black and white charcoal drawings of plastic objects on