The artist’s civic and creative stance was shaped under the influence of the Club of Creative Youth Suchasnyk and the Ukrainian intelligentsia associated with it. According to the artist himself, he was most profoundly influenced by Les Taniuk, Alla Horska, Opanas Zalyvaha, Valentyn Zadorozhnyi, Ivan Svitlychnyi, Ivan Drach, Mykola Vinhranovskyi, Lina Kostenko, and Vasyl Stus.

Together with like-minded colleagues Petro Kot, Fedir Tetyanych, Viktor Hryhorov, and Borys Plaksii, Malyshko co-organized a self-education group. The artists held apartment-based exhibitions accompanied by discussions.

He worked at the Architectural and Artistic Studio of the Dnipropetrovsk City Executive Committee, and later at the Kyiv Combine of Monumental and Decorative Art. Commissioned by the Artistic Production Combine, under the Art Fund of the Ukrainian SSR, he created monumental works in various cities across Ukraine. At the same time, he developed his own projects — continually refining his skills, setting himself new artistic challenges, working with metal and wood, while continuing to paint.

After receiving a plot of land in the village Maliutanka near Brovary, Malyshko began building a house based on his own design. Later, in Maliutanka, he restored the workshop-house of painter Mykola Pymonenko, which had been damaged by fire.

In spirit, Mykola Malyshko is a true neo-modernist, who perceives contemporaneity as both infinity and mystery, exploring it through individual figurative and plastic formulas. His artistic concept of time is the present moment — an instant lived here and now, which becomes the boundary between past and future. The artist continues to search for expressive means that correspond to the image of modernity, within which he feels most organically at home.