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. 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. For Anna Zemánková, creating was a fundamental life activity, thanks to which she could prolong her symbolic fertility and become again and again the creator of new existences, "which were more beautiful than nature had ever created." In a documentary film made about her in 1969 by Vlastimil Venclík, she appears as a woman of exalted expression and dramatic gestures, who does not doubt her privileged status as an artist or the uniqueness of her talent. After a brief period in which she experimented with format, technique or colour, her work became a daily ritual before 1960. She drew while listening to classical music, often in a state between a dream and a pre-dawn wakefulness. She used mostly A1 and A2 quarters (but eventually also smaller to completely miniature formats) on which, while still in a subdued state of consciousness, she laid out the overall composition, which she later filled in with ornamental details. She started with a pencil sketch, which she painted over with tempera paints or pastel. She worked with professional painting equipment and used a range of coloured valers, sometimes adding reflective colours to enhance the details. After 1963, she used mostly dry pastel, which she "softened" with cooking oil and supplemented with ink or ink pen drawing. Later, she traced details in pencil