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Burlington artist Helen (Bobbie) de Silaghi, Countess was generous, lively

Flamboyant artist, astral traveller



imagePAUL LEGALL, THE HAMILTON SPECTATOR Burlington artist Helen (Bobbi) de Silaghi has shuffled off this mortal coil after spending most of her life exploring other dimensions where normal concepts of human mortality would be considered illusory. A self-described time traveller, she claimed to have visited other planets and to have foreseen the human form 5,000 years into the future as she roamed the cosmos through astral projection. She created a new artistic genre through these extraterrestrial ramblings called cosmic art. She also believed she had lived many lives before and was first incarnated as a bloodthirsty Mongolian warrior 6,000 years ago. In her direct bloodlines, she claimed to be related to Prince Charles and a descendant of Vlad the Impaler, after whom Dracula was created.

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While this part of her biography might be hard to pin down, there's no doubt the Romanian-born countess had packed a lot of living in her 88 years before she died in Creek Way Village nursing home in Burlington on Sunday. She was in the late stages of Alzheimer's disease and had been under the guardianship of the public trustee for several years. Born into an aristocratic family, she quickly established herself as a child prodigy by holding her first art show in Bucharest when she was only 11. She had a charmed upbringing with doting parents, an active social life and travels to Italy and France to study art. But her well-protected world of wealth and privilege was shattered when the Communists overran the country after the Second World War. She fled with her husband Stephen in 1949 and they landed in Hamilton after a brief period in Italy. Dumitru Stan, 85, who also emigrated from Romania, said he met the couple through the Romanian Orthodox Church in Hamilton. He remembered her as a charming, generous woman who helped out with the women's auxiliary. He said she and her husband, a musician who died two years ago, were divorced after they left Hamilton and moved to Toronto. She never remarried and has no known relatives in Canada. Her parents and brother died in Romania several years ago. Stan lost track of her for several years until she moved to a house on King Road in Burlington in the late 1960s where she became known as one of Burlington's most gracious and generous hostesses. Jaak Viirland, who had met her in the late 1950s, remembers seeing cars lined up in her driveway at all times of the day and night. "She had an open door policy," he recalled. "You could meet anybody there, from a Romanian diplomat to a welfare recipient." She also entertained politicians, athletes, artists, gangsters and journalists. There was also the occasional freeloader who'd drop in unannounced and stay for a few weeks. One of her regular visitors was a promoter of the Miss Nude World Pageant at the Four Seasons Nature Resort in Flamborough. She had often acted as a judge for the contest with a Mexican diplomat she was dating at the time. In the 1960s, while she was holding art shows around the world, she generated a media buzz when she unveiled her first cosmic art. She painted scenes from distant planets where highly evolved humanoids conceived in incubators with vestigial bodies communicated through extra sensory perception and lived almost 1,000 years. Through her cosmic travels, she claims to have seen supernovas and black holes before scientists knew they existed. Her offbeat theories tended to overshadow her artistic talent -- which was considerable -- and generated headlines in the tabloid press, including the National Enquirer. But she didn't care what people thought and wrote off detractors as unevolved souls incapable of understanding her. Viirland said de Silaghi had lost much of her "mojo" after the public trustee took over her affairs and placed her in a nursing home. She had stopped painting or talking about psychic matters. She just wanted to go back to her home on King Road, which had been sold by the trustee along with her furniture and boxes full of art work. "She wasn't a happy camper," Viirland recalled. "She kept saying, 'I want go to home. Who took me out of my home?'" Visitation will be held for de Silaghi at Smith's Funeral Home on Guelph Line in Burlington from 3 to 6 p.m., Friday. plegall@thespec.com


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