Who is František PON.?

František PON., full name František Poněšický, is the pseudonym under which husband-and-wife team Jitka Baliharová (1942–2022) and Oldřich Přibík (1956–2025) created their paintings and books together. František as a pseudonym was born at the beginning of the 1990s in the small South Bohemian village of Poněšice, not far from Hluboká nad Vltavou, and his paintings have appeared both in Poněšice and Prague, wherever both artists happened to be at the time.

Jitka, originally a graphic artist and art editor, and her husband, a journalist, began creating colouring books and folding picture books for children during the 1980s. With time, it began to be less apparent who was the one to come up with the ideas, pictures or texts. In the end, this was also the case with the paintings, lithographs and books signed with the abbreviation František PON. Jitka specialised in fine details, such as flowers, birds, the patterns on Persian carpets, liqueur glasses or elegant neck-ties. Olda, on the other hand, was responsible for the heavier work, such as creating the sky, building houses or wooden fences round playgrounds. But both of them loved cats, who you can find on most of their paintings and prints. They also wrote about cats, and what it’s like to live with them, in their books.