We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Anton Vernygor. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Anton below.

Anton, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

When I was a child, I already realized that my life would be connected with art, and it was not that challenging because my parents used to send me to various after-school classes and I had the opportunity to practice different roles, mostly in sports. Every time I picked up drawings by older artists or saw oil paintings, I felt excited about art and started painting regularly. At the age of 13, I went to study at a military sports school where I was not allowed to draw, there were permanent conflicts, officers did not understand my motives and, in general, according to the philosophy of the militaries who replaced my parents, there was no place for art, but there was a relatively good position that I took – an artist of army posters. I had enough resources for 3 years of study, after that I gave up this attempt to become a military athlete and went to the Sumy Lysenko Art School, which I also did not finish because of a conflict with the teacher, after that I decided to study art on my own, came to school and constantly sketched on the back desks, for which I also received a lot of negative comments from teachers. Against the backdrop of all these difficulties in communicating with society for a young person who has chosen a creative path, I went from the opposite and started studying tattoos, that allowed me to work for a living and have the opportunity to travel and meet people from the creative fields.
After graduation, I moved from Sumy to Lviv, where my growth as an artist has begun. I used to get tattoos, travel around Ukraine and Europe, meeting interesting people, and in general, it was a freestyle phase of my life. At the age of 18, under mysterious circumstances, my friends and I already had studios in the centre of Lviv, and I started working in the meantime and getting interested in other medias such as painting, printmaking, photography, and graphics. I continue to work there and keep trying to support this underground art gallery. After the war started, my priorities changed, I stopped my career as a tattoo artist and started my journey as a freelance artist, which is continuing and gonna keep going as long as my health lasts.
I’ve been living and working with art for 25 years, it’s quite difficult, especially in the context of war, when most people are interested in how and for what to eat and how to pay the rent. Art is what has saved me throughout my life and keeps me in tone, just like a morning portion of sports activities.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I started my career as a tattoo artist. I worked as a tattoo artist for 7 years, and with the outbreak of a full-scale war in Ukraine in 2022, I left this business. Later, I focused on oil painting and continued to draw graphics, expanding the format of my works.
During 2023, I worked on joint projects with the artist Sofia Maksymovych: the video art “Dialogue” about the subtlety of communication and the impact of human understanding, the documentary series “Local” about artists who are localized and work in Lviv, and a series of photographs and graphics “Acupuncture”, from which we created the zine of the same name.

Now I am engaged in what most vividly conveys my sense of life – painting. I also use photography, video, printmaking, and other media to bring my concepts to life. One of my latest series of graphics from January-February 2024 is about dreams, landscapes, encounters, places and life.
A diary, capturing the moment, the feeling of the body. Dialogue with God, search for the meaning of life. I am currently working on several personal and collaborative projects.
The main focus in my artistic practices is the discovery of the environment through forms that arise from sensory sensations. The environment is a resource, and memory is one of the tools. My idea is to archive fleeting moments, to record the fragile present.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

An important mission at this time is to preserve memory and record the present. An artist, in my opinion, is someone who can feel and reproduce, remind society of the importance of observing the environment, being present at the moment, feeling oneself and not separating oneself from nature. I want to help people not to forget about the transience of existence and, what is currently relevant, about preservation and humanity.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

In my opinion, a new artistic wave is currently being created in Ukraine — free from commercial goals, focused on conveying ideas and recreating the disturbing past, present and future. The environment influences themes and ideas, and artists are the people who can feel the vibrations of society’s thoughts most subtly. The difficulty is that in this difficult period, people who are outside the artistic circles do not have the resources and, perhaps, the energy and time to support art projects, to buy works by artists. Everyone is trying to save themselves and their families first.
Therefore, the support of foreign connoisseurs, collectors, gallerists, etc. is very important for the prosperity of Ukrainian art, as well as its preservation and future.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.behance.net/anton-vernygor
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vernygoranton?igsh=dHl0M2lqMHJiZHYx&utm_source=qr

Image Credits

A photo of me in my studio by David Hadland