Stanislav Stanek was an academy painter born in Plzen (Pilsen) in 1927. He has spent his entire life working on his art, perfecting painting style witch has been known and respected for the last a 50 years. One of the prominent artists of the Czech Republic, Stanislav Stanek was educated at the Academy of Fine art in Prague, eventually settling in the southern Plzen region of his country. Stanek has worked in a vast array of different mediums, including stone lithography, pastels and oil painting, graphic design, sculpture, metal work, glass etching and ceramic. Stanek was a leading contender in the contest to design the new Czechoslovakian national currency in 1981, and in that same year also won a commission to create a work that would represent the spirit of world cinematography, for which he painted his famous portrait of film star Charlie Chaplain. Stanek's signature artistic style makes unusual use of color, line, and shape, but maintains a commitment to a realistic impression of the world around him. Many of his chosen subjects come from the mundane and frequently overlooked, from crowded city blocks to cab drivers. But Stanek also enjoyed representing more famous figures, such as the Biblical Adam and Eve, or the stone lithography of Jesus commissioned for the 500th birthday of the church in Nepomuk. His many paintings of Miguel Cervantes's famous characters, Don Quichote and Sancho Panza, are examples of the scope and detail of his imagination. "I'm interested in objects that hide something inside them", Stanek says. "Each person or place or object that I paint is like a secret garden. I want to get inside, see it close up, see what kind of flowers are there, smell them, and through my art I invite everyone else to step through as well, to experience the beauty of world the way I experience it." Stanislav Stanek died in 2011 at the age of 84 years.