The Colour of Grief: Sasha's Story

We lived in different countries, but my father and I were incredibly close. He was my greatest inspiration, my creative partner, and my biggest role model. When he died unexpectedly in 2022, everything changed. The colour drained from my world — not just metaphorically, but literally. I couldn’t cope with the silence he left behind, so I began to paint. Not to create something beautiful, but simply to survive.

My father, Ivan Shalmin, was a renowned Moscow-based architect and a classically trained artist. In the final years of his life, he created large-scale digital abstract paintings for the interiors of his architectural projects — bold, expressive works full of movement and colour. At the start of 2020, after being made redundant from my job as a graphic designer, I flew to Moscow to help him prepare for his first solo exhibition. We stayed up late every night for two weeks, working side by side. I didn’t know it then, but those late nights would become some of my most cherished memories.

After returning to Glasgow, I ended up working for him remotely, full time. I was his graphic designer but I also organised his participation in art fairs across Europe — in London, Amsterdam, and Paris — and began creating short, animated versions of his canvases. He loved my input, and we began exhibiting the animations alongside his paintings. Audiences responded very well to the combination — the moving image and sound helped people to connect more deeply to his originals. We even had a show planned in Manhattan in 2025.

Then he died of a heart attack. Suddenly. Prematurely. Unable to process the loss, I kept reaching for my phone, expecting a new message from him with a new painting attached. But there were none. The silence was unbearable.

So I began painting the pictures he wasn’t sending me anymore. But instead of colour, they came out black and white. Lifeless. As though the images themselves were grieving too. I used his style and techniques, but the energy had shifted. I was painting my own sorrow.

Alongside the loss of my father, I was also grieving my cultural heritage and the city where I spent my childhood. I couldn’t return to Moscow for his funeral, and now I face the painful reality that I can never go back — not even to visit his grave, or one day, the graves of my grandparents. There will never be any closure and I’m still coming to terms with that. I was also completely unprepared for navigating unexpected shifts in family dynamics, painful truths, and other complications that all happened as a result of his passing.

This was the beginning of The Colour of Grief — my first solo exhibition, and the most personal work I’ve ever created. The first stage of the work I called No Colour. I was in shock and denial — numb and hollow. The canvases are stark, stripped back, disconnected. As time went on, pain began to seep in. The black and white remained, but now glitches began to appear — visual fractures, ruptures. I wanted to reflect the overwhelming pain I was carrying. Grief was like static running through me, unpredictable and violent.

While there are recognisable stages to grief, the truth is, it doesn’t follow a script. You don’t get to move neatly from one emotion to the next. The hardest part is not knowing how you’ll feel from one moment to the next. You’re not in control. One day you’re numb, the next, you’re inconsolable. It’s chaos.

After a while, I realised I couldn’t stay in that darkness forever. It was important to feel it, to let it pass through me rather than suppress it — but if you stay there too long, it begins to consume you. I knew I had to climb out of the pit I was in and begin again. I started focusing on the brief, fleeting moments where I felt OK — a flicker of calm, a second of lightness. And then I painted those.

This became a turning point in the work. I wanted to magnify those moments of peace, to honour them. I began painting what I called emotional snapshots — visual reminders that I could still feel joy, even if only for a few minutes. And over time, five minutes of calm turned into ten. Then twenty. The paintings became a way of anchoring those emotions, holding onto them. When I looked back at them, I could feel the echo of that peaceful state.

Eventually, I began to create works that blended both worlds — colour and darkness, joy and sorrow, chaos and stillness. One of the hardest things about grief is holding conflicting emotions at the same time. You can feel love and devastation simultaneously. Hope and despair. I wanted to capture that complexity — the truth that healing doesn’t mean the pain goes away. It just means it finds a different place to live.

After several years of working digitally, my father told me he missed the physical process of painting. The smell of the paint, the resistance of the brush on canvas. He said digital painting always felt like there was a barrier between him and the work.

At the time, I didn’t understand. I loved working digitally — it was quick, clean and exciting. But as time went on, I began to feel it too. That something essential was being lost in translation. So I went back to the stretched canvas. And it felt right.

The final four pieces in the exhibition are oil and acrylic paintings. They mark a shift from chaos to calm, from external movement to internal stillness. The forms quieten, the colours soften. These works are about peace, acceptance of the present moment, and the possibility of beginning again.

You’re warmly invited

The Colour of Grief opens on Friday 10 October 2025  — World Mental Health Day — at the New Glasgow Society, 1307 Argyle Street, Glasgow G3 8TL. The opening reception is at 6:00-8:00pm. It runs until Sunday 19 October as part of the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival.

This show is not just a tribute to my father. It’s also a fundraiser for Cruse Scotland, 50% of all proceeds will be donated to the charity, whose support for people experiencing grief is invaluable.

If you’ve ever lost someone, or simply wondered what grief might look like — raw, layered, and, at times, even hopeful — I hope you’ll come. This exhibition is for anyone who’s lived through loss, who’s felt broken and remade, who’s trying to find colour again.

Thank you for reading my story.

This article was written by Sasha Shalmina. We hope you will join us in attending her upcoming exhibition 'The Colour of Grief' at The New Glasgow Society Friday 10-Sunday 19 October. You can view more of Sasha's work by clicking here.