Vitaliy Tulenev wrote his picture Ancestors in 1980. The artist depicted an old rural cemetery in a surrealistic manner. At the foreground, there are tombstone monuments with photographs, crosses, mourning crowns. The artist arranged the painted objects very close to each other so that there is no air between them, what is usually common for landscapes. Tombstones merge with massive tree trunks, and even flow into them in some places. The grey and earthy hues dominate the color range of the painting.

Vitaliy Tulenev wrote his pictures in paste technique. For this, he used thick oil paints and applied them on canvas in dense, wide and relief dashes. It gave an accent to the shape and texture of the painted objects.

In the late 1960s, Vitaliy Tulenev left natural drawings and began to create surrealistic compositions. The stories were based on dreams and memories of the artist, often evocative of his childhood.

The artist was also inspired with scenes from real life. In a surrealistic manner, he depicted queues for deficit goods in shops, women selling at a fair, peasant children feeding horses or playing with homemade dolls.

From 1966 to 1972, Tulenev taught at the Repin Institute, then he resigned from this position and dedicated all his time to the art works. In 1972, he joined the art group Eleven. Eugenia Antipova, Boris Shamanov, Valeriy Watenin, Leonid Tkchenko and other Leningrad artists – totally 11 painters - were members of this group. In 1972, the group Eleven organized its first exhibition, which opened in the new exhibition hall of the Union of Artists of the RSFSR in Ohta. Each participant made his own small exposition of several works. The audience was so big that the hall could not house them all at once.

Nowadays the works of Vitaliy Tulenev are exhibited in the Russian Museum, the Tretyakov Gallery, in museums and private collections of Russia, Great Britain, France, China and other countries.