Beginning of Winter

Anatolii Fedorovych Ponomarenko was a Ukrainian artist, painter, graphic artist, member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine, and an Honored Artist of Ukraine (1972). Born on February 2, 1922 in the village of Katerynopil (now Cherkasy region, Ukraine), he participated in World War II and earned combat awards. In 1949, Ponomarenko graduated from the Kyiv School of Decorative Arts. His teachers were A. Bondarovych, A. Sereda. From then, he worked as a set designer at the Theater of Russian Drama in Kyiv, and as assistant to the chief artist at the Kyiv Film Studio of Feature Films. He designed the films "The Feat of a Scout" (1947), "The Third Blow" (1948), and "In Peaceful Days" (1950) and performances at the I. Franko Kyiv Ukrainian Drama Theater, creating posters, postcards, and illustrations for book editions. He collaborated with the publishing houses "Soviet Writer", "Youth", "Art", "Soviet School", and others. Ponomarenko created many works in the genre of landscape and still life, working in various techniques - tempera, watercolor, and pastel. Starting in 1954, he was a participant in all-Ukrainian, all-Union, and foreign art exhibitions. His personal exhibitions were held in Kyiv (1983, 1995). Ponomarenko's main works include "Call" (1974), "Pastel Autumn" (1976), "Crimean Landscape" (1979), "In the Carpathians" (1983), "In Memory" (1991), and "Untitled" (1996). He died on July 31, 2006 in Kyiv. His works are kept in some museums of Ukraine and private collections.