Northern beauty by Tamara Yufa

Tamara Yufa (nee Chvanova) is an honored artist of Russia (1999), People’s Artist of Karelia, Honored Artist of the Karelian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (1985), laureate of the State Prize of the Karelian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (1979), Honorary citizen of Petrozavodsk.
Tamara Grigorievna Yufa was born on March 2, 1937 in the village Kolodeznaya, Lipetsk Region. In 1956-1960 she studied at the Leningrad Art Teacher Training College. Since 1960, she taught at school.
She created compositions based on The Tale of Igor’s Campaign (triptych, 1966), made illustrations for the editions of the Kalevala epic (1966, 1970 and 2000), The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Knights (1970, 1978), the tales of Andersen, Topelius, the Brothers Grimm and other authors.

She worked as a stage designer at the National Theater of the Republic of Karelia, the Karelian Puppet Theater, designed performances based on the works of Topelius, Ibsen and Lindgren.
The largest public collection of works is in the Museum of Fine Arts of the Republic of Karelia in Petrozavodsk. The works of T. Yufa are kept in the National Museum of the Republic of Karelia, in the museums of Arkhangelsk and Syktyvkar.
Tamara is a participant of All-Union and All-Russian exhibitions, as well as foreign exhibitions in the GDR, Finland, Sweden, group traveling exhibitions of the Academy of Arts in Moscow, Irkutsk, Berlin, Tehran, Sweden, Finland, Norway.
Tamara Yufa and Karelia in the minds of many people are closely linked and turned into synonyms. Tamara Yufa is the soul of Karelia. This is not a metaphor – it’s a reality. In in order to paint landscapes like this, one has to experience everything from within, to feel like a stone, water, and a plant. The gift of such reincarnations, which our ancestors owned, is lost by civilization. But Tamara managed to restore it and she shows it in her paintings.
The artist created her own, unique style, built on the expressiveness of graceful lines woven into a bizarre pattern that unites characters and nature into a single whole.