The pictures began to enter the museum collections in 2000. The earliest are dated 1993; the later ones, 2010. Some were created together with her daughter Oksana, who also completed courses at the School of Mastery of the Mykolaiv branch of the National Union of Masters of Folk Art of Ukraine.

Analysing documents, articles and mentions in the novellas, one may count more than 130 works created by the artist. Most of them are bound to folklore themes and reflect the traditions, rites, feasts and tales of the people of the Mykolaiv Region. This does not mean, however, that the master was unmoved by the problems of her own day. She wrote of contemporary events with heat.

Like most folk masters, Yevhenia Bondarenko worked with materials that were to hand: hardboard, canvas, cardboard or even paper. She experimented actively with paints and with forgotten techniques. The frames she made simple, from ordinary slats and skirting boards, or used ready-made ones. Sometimes they were larger than the picture, and so the master additionally “dressed” them in a mount.

Yevhenia Bondarenko liked to work in series, as if telling stories in sequence. Each picture opens new details, emotions or sides of the idea. Examples are the diptych The Forgotten Lighthouse, the quadriptych Fishermen Live on Kinburn, Birds of Tavria and others.

That the artist worked long over her pictures, reworked and refined them, is shown by two versions of Easter in Tavria. They have the same subject, but in the details they differ greatly.

Bondarenko worked in the genre of folk (naïve) painting, with the features proper to it: flatness, simplification of images, a decorative quality, a fairy-tale air. Her figures often receive human traits. Houses, for example, have human faces and headdresses (Tramontane); branches of trees turn into hands (The Trees Died Standing); a lighthouse becomes a woman’s figure or a grieving Cossack (Mayakivna Goes to Be Married, The Forgotten Lighthouse). Yet there are works that are almost academic, for in her time Yevhenia Bondarenko completed courses at the regional scientific and methodological centre led by Honoured Artist of Ukraine Mykhailo Riasnianskyi. These are mostly landscapes: The Stake Net, There Is Fish! — I’m Going, Kinburn. Salt Lakes.

It should be said that Yevhenia Bondarenko had not a single work in the classical style of the painting, for she always laid the elements of “Tavryka” upon a painterly canvas. She was not a professional artist, and so it was quite hard for her to convey the full beauty of the painting. What remains priceless, however, is the folklore material she gathered and her artistic seeing of the beauty of the Mykolaiv Region and of the deep philosophy of life of the South.

Yevhenia Bondarenko took inspiration from the nature of her native land, from its refined plants, tender birds and ringing air, and sought to use motifs, compositions and subjects characteristic of the Mykolaiv Region. For she understood clearly that Tavrian painting is not simply a well-painted ornament or subject, but a complex philosophical and ethical system of relations with the world, worked out by different generations of the people of the Northern Black Sea coast.