Throughout her creative career, Tamara Vladimirovna Yudina has painted a variety of compositions, including field and garden flowers, fruits, and berries. Particularly prominent, however, are her trays decorated with bunches of rowan berries which have become a trademark of the Nizhny Tagil tray painting art in the 1980s. The artist created her first trays featuring rowan berries in the 1960s. Back then, she used the mixed Moscow painting technique which combined features of Zhostovo and Ural painting.
After the Ural tray painting experienced a revival in the 1970s, Tamara Yudina became one of the first artists to paint bunches of rowan berries using the traditional two-color brushstroke technique. From that time on, rowan berries became a prominent motif of her work. The early compositions were rather simple, with sharp color contrasts and tonal transitions in the berry bunches.
Over the years, the artist has been perfecting her compositions, refining the details, and implementing new techniques. In 1983, her trays with “Ural rowan berries” were recognized with the second prize at the regional consumer goods competition. Two years later, they were awarded a silver medal at the All-Union Exhibition of Achievements of National Economy in Moscow.
By that time, Tamara Yudina had perfected her technique for painting ripe berries, achieving a more picturesque image and softer tonal transitions. She painted the upper row of each berry bunch in light yellow and orange and the bottom in maroon.
The artist also changed the depiction of rowan leaves. Initially, she used shades of green. In the second half of the 1980s, she began painting leaves with brown, which she accompanied with various shades of grass green and golden orange.
