The creator of the design, the painter Eva Hašková, is a graphic artist and illustrator, winner of many awards - like the Most Beautiful Book poll or the Czech Exlibris Triennial. She has had more than eighty solo exhibitions at home and abroad. She is a member of the Association of Czech Graphic Artists Hollar.
She graduated from the University of Applied Arts in 1974 under professors Zdenek Sklenář and Jiří Anderle. Her graduation work from 1974 - illustrations for Nezval's Valeria and the Week of Wonders, which she created using colour mixed media, immediately attracted the attention of the editors of graphic arts and bibliophile prints in Lyra Pragensis. In 1976 Hašková introduced herself to a wider circle of collectors and bibliophiles with these magical illustrations.
She is mainly engaged in free graphics and illustrations. She works with a combined technique of intaglio, etching and aquatint. Today Eva Hašková has dozens of graphic sheets and illustrations for several dozen books. Her work is received with interest and admiration which is evidenced by the fact that her illustrations have been honoured with prizes at exhibitions. In the competition for the most beautiful book of the year she received the Arno Sáňka Prize in 1976 and the Ministry of Culture Prize in 1979, and at the IX. In 1980, at the Biennial of Applied Graphics in Brno (International Exhibition of Illustration and Book Graphics), she received the Vyšehrad Publishing House prize for an exhibited series of illustrations and the IBA Leipzig award for free prints on a literary theme.
Eva Hašková's prints surprise viewers with their richness of tone and often colour range, but always with an interesting and original composition. Her favourite colours are brown and green, sometimes she also uses combinations of blue and purple. Many of her works continue the decorative richness of Art Nouveau both in their overall composition and in the range of floral motifs.
"Awareness of how fragile and how easily, quickly and irreversibly destructible things and conditions worthy of human effort are - I think - an essential feature of Eva Hašková's work. With virtuoso expressive drawing, modulated and harmonised by subtle colour, her prints speak to us engagingly, mostly seriously - but sometimes also with unsparing humour and understanding irony. They speak about the things of life, the real ones, not the artificial ones, with fashionable myopia and short-sightedness, with profiteering expediency and pandering appeal attacking our senses and wallets," wrote Bohuslav Holý on the occasion of this year's exhibition of Eva Hašková at the Hollar Gallery.
Since 1996, Eva Hašková has been creating stamps and in 2018 she won the Czech National Bank's public competition for a commemorative 100-crown banknote.
Martin Srb was born in 1954 in Prague. He belongs to the circle of the so-called Czech School of Engravers, which includes engravers who worked for the State printing works of securities in Prague (K. Wolf, B. Heinz, J. Schmidt, L. Jirka, J. Mráček, M. Ondráček, etc.). Here he became familiar with the technique of engraving banknotes and with the works of other engravers. In this period he left the engraving of plastics and began to devote himself soley to engraving steel as a graphic technique.
As steel engraving is a very difficult technique and difficult to imitate, it is used not only in the printing of banknotes, but also in the preparation of substrates for the printing of postage stamps. That is why most of the authors of engravings for banknotes are also involved in the engraving of stamps for the Czech Post. Martin Srb’s first engraving of a postage stamp was done in 1988. Since then, he has worked on more than a hundred postage stamps and approximately the same number of FDCs (first day covers).
After the collapse of Czechoslovakia, in 1993, he was able to work on stamps for the Slovak Post. Between 1992-1995 he cooperated with the CANADIAN BANK NOTE COMPANY in Ottawa, for which he made a number of engravings on stocks and banknotes printed for the Czech Republic.
He now works as an engraver and designer at the State printing works of securities. Recently, he has created engravings of portraits of Alois Rašín and Karel Engliš based on designs by ac. mal. Eva Hašková for the commemorative 100 CZK banknotes issued by the Czech National Bank in 2018 (respectively in 2022).
Since 1992, Martin Srb has presented his work at numerous exhibitions and the stamps he has been involved in have won numerous awards in the domestic and international scene. Since 2020, he has also been a member of the Hollar Graphic Designers Association.
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