From there, he transferred in 1953 to the Faculty of Education at Charles University for the newly opened professorship of painting and drawing for secondary schools (prof. Karel Lidický, Martin Salcman).

Martin Salcman, who had studied with Jan Preisler and was friends with František Kupka, introduced the sculptor Slavík to painting and influenced his work for life with his method of teaching, by emphasis on considering the relationships between visual elements and by pointing out the relative validity of their values.

As a teacher, he made a significant impact on completely different painters - his assistant Zdeněk Sýkora, Karel Malich, Vladislav Mirvald, Dalibor Chatrný and Otakar Slavík.

Since the school was outside the centre of communist party interest and control, Professor Salcman and his assistants Zdeněk Sýkora and Kamil Linhart could inform the students about contemporary world art.

After graduating in 1958, although he was still receiving a scholarship from the Fine Arts Fund for several years, Otakar Slavík decided to make a living by manual labour in order to do without the inevitable artistic compromises with the regime.

Slavík's second exhibition of paintings at the Václav Špála Gallery (1970), together with sculptures by Karel Nepraš, led to a rapprochement with artists around the Křižovnická School.

Soon after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia and the new consolidation of the communist regime, Otakar Slavík lost the opportunity to exhibit and returned to manual labour.

Thanks to his wife's employment, for the first time in his life he had no financial worries and could devote himself to painting and his new-found great hobby, visiting galleries and museums.

He returned to the Czech Republic with a large retrospective exhibition organized by the National and Central Bohemia Galleries in the premises of the Municipal Library in 1991.

[4] The painter was influenced by his training in ceramics modelling in Bechyně and especially by sculpting in the stone masonry school in Hořice, which deepened his figurative sensibility for lifetime.

In Czech art he follows painters from the early 20th century, especially Jindřich Prucha, Jan Preisler and Bohumil Kubišta[10] (Portrait of Miss Ulčová, 1955).

The humanized geometry was signing on to the technical givens of civilization (called "second nature") and the new principles of painting were strict and precise, concrete, clear, factual illustrative and positive in relation to man.

[13] Otakar Slavík exhibits with the Křižovatka group and representatives of the New Sensibility, but he remains a solitary artist who combines the most rigorous solutions with more traditional, but equally distinct approaches.

[4] He shared with a number of exhibitors an interest in the purely painterly qualities of the picture and the application of order in its composition, but his direction in terms of meaning was different and, like Alena Kučerová, he did not abandon figuration.

Slavík's painting in this period ranges widely from hints of architectural order (Interior II, 1973) to free abstraction (Fairy Tale, 1970–1971).

In the first half of the 1970s, the dynamic element of swirling circles and subtle light vibrations appears first in drawings (1972) and later in paintings executed in contrasting vibrant colours of reds and yellows (Composition, 1975).

After the signing of Charter 77, StB harassment and a heart attack, new works were created - monumental apocalyptic landscapes and landscape themes inspired by trips to Šumava (Unsuccessful Attempt to Cross the Border, 1977–1979, Sunset, 1978) and emotional parables of the human fate in the series of (Tightrope Walkers), which Jirous categorizes as "imbosh art", the painting of hunted game[note 1] (The Last Attempt to Cross the Border, 1979, Tightrope Walker in the Air, 1980).

[19] An illustration of the painter's state of mind is a picture painted shortly after his arrival in Austria, with muddy colours that stretch like smudges (Heimweh, 1980).

[6] Slavík continued his series of Tightrope walkers, archaic figures whose earthly existence the painter reflects on, even in exile in Vienna.

These paintings glow with fiery tones of red and yellow, azure blue, and light that both illuminates and bathes the bodies and floats over them like water.

After a retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery in 1991, further monumental works were created in which the painter explored the possibilities of colour to no end (Discomfort I, 1995).

Flickering, quivering brush strokes, heavy pastes, optical raster, hatching, and paper gluing serve as expressive and constructional devices tied to painting.

He is not at all shy about relearning the basics together with amateurs, so that he can, out of genuine personal necessity, invent, bring the past into the present, transform tradition into novelty.