Autumnal Mood

Heron

Serigraph

13.25 x 34.50 Inches

Artist Proof

©1977 Alex Colville

Provenance: The da Brgha Collection

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The first dream that I had of Merlin, occurred four years prior to meeting him in the waking state. In that dream, there was the most beautiful heron which flew close by; it blinked and when its lid reopened, the eye had become liquid eventually transforming to the most intense white light. Forty-two years ago, after a four-year wait, Merlin sexily slipped into my life at my Hell’s Kitchen walkup. For the next seven years our dance together was truly sublime.

Heron at Cowichan Estuary, Vancouver Island, B.C.

The last time I saw Joop, whom I had met five years prior to Merlin, I stayed at this lovely home in Victoria B. C. for a couple of weeks. We drove up the TransCanada Highway to the northern tip of the island one weekend, stopping off at the Cowichan Estuary and Cathedral Grove. On the drive back, we were followed by a lone heron as we drove southward through Cowichan Estuary a local nature preserve for herons. I was reminded of Merlin whilst holding hands with Joop. Joop was the oldest and most sensual of my lovers; too, he has been the oldest soul of my lovers. It was sad to say so long to him last summer.

Sir Anthony van Dyck, Self-Portrait

van der Pelster, Joop 12/1948 <O> 8/2023 

The fragment who was Joop was a fifth level old artisan – second incarnation at this level – in the observation mode, with a goal of stagnation, a pragmatist, in the emotional part of intellectual centre.   

This fragment had a Saturn/Lunar body type.   

Joop’s primary chief feature was stubbornness with a weak secondary of self-deprecation.   

Joop is sixth cast in his cadence and his cadence is fourth in the second greater cadence.  He is a member of entity one, cadre one, greater cadre 7, pod/node 414.   

Joop has a discarnate artisan essence twin whom he did know in childhood and an incarnate priest task companion, with whom no plans were made to meet in this lifetime.   

This was a resting life for this fragment, whose three primary needs were: security, communion and exchange.   

He was a sculptor in Russia – at the time of the 1917 revolution, took a stand with the communists and was killed in a riot in St. Petersburg.  He chose not to be reborn during the Second World War, in Western Europe, but in an old soul country (Netherlands), rather than a mixed young/mature society.   

At that time, the Soviet government was very early-young soul repressive, while the general population was mid-cycle mature and even though he was only 30 when he died, in that previous life, he chose not to be reborn in the Soviet Union and took a resting life in the Netherlands.   

Arvin felt a connectedness with Joop because they are in the same cadre, and Joop had a great deal of service in his casting as does Arvin.  Here is a priest-cast artisan who is a member of an entity one, so he has needs to serve both the higher ideal and the common good.   

There was a great deal of the “Visionary” here, which is one of the seven aspects of the artisan.  He was also a “walker” in that he could pierce the veil between the planes at will, even though he did not call this phenomenon by name.   

He and Arvin have known each other in many previous lives.  They have been lovers of both sexes and of both hetero and homoerotic orientation.  Joop has filled the mentor position in Arvin’s support group three times.   

Perhaps the most notable life that this fragment had was in the late sixteenth century-early seventeenth century, when he was the Flemish portrait painter and depicter of religious themes, Anthony van Dyck.  Anthony was later knighted and is known historically as, Sir Anthony van Dyck. 

Massacre of the Innocents, Oil on Canvas. Peter Paul Rubens 1611-1612

He was a good friend, sometimes-lover and collaborator of Peter Paul Rubens – during that lifetime, I was then briefly a lover of Peter Paul Rubens, female and a muse; the relationship was not long-lived.  Both of these men, Anthony and Paul, were bisexual and lusty and enjoyed the company of both men and women, even though they pretended to be very good Catholic boys.   

Interestingly enough, the fragment who was Peter Paul was in the immediate past life, the imminent American photographer, Ansel Adams – same great artistic ability, different medium.   

Joop did have great ability to make his lovers feel loved; this is something that generally goes along with the latter part of the old soul cycle.   

They are no longer so concerned about their own sexual pleasure, mainly because it is easier for them and rather commonplace but they do generally enjoy bringing others to the heights of ecstasy.   

Every mature soul should have a late old soul lover at least once, just as the opposite is true.  The mature soul brings to the sex act the passion and the fire, while the very old soul brings to it the skill and patience of so many lives.   

All told, Joop to date has had 18 past lives with Arvin and 12 with his task companion – who was recently – Merlin Ben-Daniel.   

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Duke Ellington & John Coltrane: In a Sentimental Mood

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Cover Photo: Portrait of Cornelis van der Geest

Oil on canvas

1620 Sir Anthony van Dyck

Provenance: National Gallery, London UK

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Self-Portrait

Oil on Canvas

1640 Sir Anthony van Dyck

Provenance: National Portrait Gallery, London UK

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Massacre of the Innocents

Oil on Canvas

1611-1612 Sir Anthony van Dyck

Provenance: The Thomson Collection, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

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You are to Jazz what wings are to an ostrich; what the fuck do eagles care that queer, unaware ostriches have wings?

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©2013-2025 Arvin da Brgha. All Rights Reserved.

Dolphin House Pets and Glimmers of El Greco’s Muse (Redux)

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grey-lines-with-black-blue-and-yellow

On the cusp of the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Georgia O’Keeffe Exhibition opening this month, I am repost this blog.  Do please enjoy.  

Whilst the Moon transited both Libra and my fifth house, these next dreams occurred on October 1, 1989.  Too, it was the seventh anniversary of that magical, and a bit cool, Friday evening in Hell’s Kitchen when Merlin and I would meet… yet again. 

Of course, at the time, he was rather ill with full-blown AIDS and horribly suffering from Candida.  However, as I have known more than 200 persons to have passed of AIDS, Merlin’s AIDS-related illnesses were mild manifestations of what can eventualise with AIDS.  I have always been grateful for that. 

These dreams – one a touchstone dream with Olaf Gamst’s old-souled son as he was during a life when he was an assistant, muse and lover of El Greco’s, the other a dream set remotely in the past on this planet or possibly on another world where the indigenous folks were decidedly extra-human though Sol III human-looking enough – were welcome inspiration. 

Too, the dreams were dreamt during the second sleep cycle that day.  Back then, I took naps as often as I could afford.  Merlin fainted several times each day and the sheer gravity of what we moved through was exhausting at times.  As he would have it, no one knew that Merlin fainted multiple times daily. 

At the time of these dreams, I had taken to the pyramid to meditate with crystals and eventually ended up privately crying at the share stark finality of what imminently loomed on the horizon.  Thus, sleep was a welcome refocussing of my energies – if only briefly.  Of course, sleep and its elixir, dreams, ever kept me focussed, inspired and aware of the macroscopic. 

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In this the first dream, I see Eleanor Bissell – my Canadian-History and English teacher at Harbord Collegiate Institute; she was doing some gardening in a blue dress that was floral-printed.  This garden had tall old trees in it.  There were hydrangea plants – large ones at that.

I went over and I greeted her and said, “Hello, Mrs. Bissell.”

I told her who I was and she had on her glasses and her breath was short.  She was just the same as when I knew her in the waking state.

This dream, the second, was set in another time and another place.  I was captured by this man in a castle-like dwelling.  A very Moorish setting, like in Spain, it was; it was not Moorish architecture like in Northern Africa but it was more so in southern Spain.  Perhaps, it was Andalusia or thereabouts.

It was brown stone which had been burnt by the Sun for years and years, tens of millennia, as a matter of fact.  I got captured and I was taken back into a room with a man; he was saying to me, “Of course you’re mine.  You’re 63%!”

This percentile was supposed to signify, if you like, being bad or evil.

He was describing things to me because he was the epitome of what one would consider evil.  I was saying, “No I’m not.”

I was saying that I didn’t want to be there and wanted to be let out.

The thing is, it was not me; rather, I was the son and he was a bronzed person; he was very swarthy but not Black.  I was his offspring; I was, in fact, his son.  Then some people came in and they were all there and I asked if I could get out with them.  They, however, said no that I couldn’t because they were alright.

They said that they were all 50% and that I was not.  I supposedly had to be 50% and therefore, as I was his son, I had to stay there with him.  I was really upset and somehow I managed to be stealthily taken away during the night, after the father left, by a woman.

She wore long flowing garb and she was again very Mediterranean or Middle Eastern-looking.  She had long limbs and café au lait complexion.  She told me how it all went that I was her son, by the same man, and that she was one of his many lovers.

However, he was never supposed to have a child by her; as a result, when she became pregnant because he so loved her, he broke with tradition and he had her put up in this particular part of the castle.

It was really fortified and very abandoned-looking but she held out there.  Nobody ever came to this part of the castle and it was very terraced and had a lot of inner walls in it.

The walls here were of a slight sandy colour and we were alone at nighttime.  As we were talking, there was battle going on behind us over in another part of the castle; the battle occurred in another part of the fortified town that supported the castle.

There were a lot of cries because there was battle going on.  You could hear a lot of horses neighing and cantering, as in the Crusades, if you like.  I don’t, however, recall having heard any gunfire.

She was telling me not to worry because he would never harm me.  Said she, I was quite well protected.  He did love me in spite of his cruelty and there was no way that he could hurt me because she was fiercely protective of me.

If he had done anything to me, she would be forced to expose him and he knew and feared that eventuality.  She told me to just go on outside and play.  So, I went out into the yard and it was a wonderful elaborate garden – very organic.

It had this pool and there inside were dolphins.  I went in to play with them.  It was a muddied pool but very large like a manmade lake.  They were playing with me as I frolicked in the water with them.

One of them had its fluke pressing down on my bum from above me.  Whilst sandwiched between them under the surface the other used it nose to push up against my breastbone and solar plexus; thus, they propelled me through the water at great exhilarating speeds.

It was a beautiful sense of motion because, of course, they travelled quite fast and they always stayed clear of going out too far.  There was a point at which they had jokingly made a fast turn and I hadn’t caught up.

So I went to stand up and it turned out that it was a very large pool and a rather deep, deep pool.  I panicked when I broke surface and they assisted me back to the shallow area.

When I came back indoors both the father and mother were there now – the swarthy humans, that is.  I said to them that there was something here in the pool a big opening, you could feel it.

I also sensed it from the dolphins as being something in the pool that they themselves feared.  The father figure was laughing and told me not to worry about that because he knew, of course, what it was.  The mother had remained quite silent and looked at me, all the time, because she was slightly to his left and behind him as he spoke.

All three of us were next in a room in the castle and, somehow, the dolphins were here as well.  There was a break in the floor, a wide open hole, and they came up and were swimming and churning up the same muddied-looking dark water.

A man then entered who looked like and was, in fact, the American actor who starred in the film, Paris, Texas.  I think that the actor’s name is, Harry Dean Stanton, but I am not certain of that; he is a scrawny, hard-faced, thin-lipped man.

He came in and had a gun and said, “I want to get paid.  I’m doing work in this building and I’m not getting paid.  I’m tired of being held up here.  Deliver!  Or else I’m going to take you out and shoot you.”

It was an interesting-looking silver gun.  I was standing up on a cabinet and he went to shoot me but I knew that he wouldn’t shoot me.  He had, in fact, turned the pistol so that the two shots rang off to my right.

What surprisingly came out, when he fired the shots, was water; however, it had light in it.  It was like lasered water and it shot out in a large chunky jet and went almost instantaneously to the wall and crashed there.

He shot rounds of it and both parents remained absolutely icy cool; they paid him very little mind.  Later on, the mother telepathically told me not to worry because he couldn’t harm me; too, she telepathically shared that I was not to move and give in to fear.  I was not to show any signs of panic.

*This was clearly a civilisation which was set here on Earth long millennia before the current ape-central, fear-ruled madness we now know.  This was a time long ago in human history when there was contact between both humans and cetaceans.  Telepathy was de rigueur; too, psychic abilities were more evolved then.

Perhaps, this was an Atlantean society or some other civilisation which predated the Atlantean.  The persons were seemingly of Mediterranean extraction and it was, however, definitely not Egyptian.

I would guess that it was post-Egyptian – the latter having occurred easily more than 60 thousand years ago; although, Europeans in their racist elitism – never having had anything to rival pyramids in Europe – reworked the agedness of Egyptian civilisation to their ends.

**I am now left to believe that this was in some way an Extra-Human civilisation where the humans closely resembled Earthly humans.  They were, however, swarthier and were archly telepathic.

Too, their foreheads were also considerably higher and had a slight concave look at the top.  Dolphins, it seems, were kept as indoor pets – just as cats and dogs are for humans.  Hence, there was the watering hole, which led to a vast underground network, where the animals could come and go from the fortified castle to the ocean, however far off.  END.

Almost instantaneously, in this the third dream, I was in another scene; it was one in which I was playing and my companion was Lars Gamst.  We were drawing, in fact, we were painting.

Lars said to the same actor, Harry Dean Stanton, who was now with me in this new dream – both the parents, incidentally, were no longer about.  Lars wanted the actor to assist him by editing.

The guy misunderstood him and didn’t know what was what.  What Lars was doing was covering the painting with a black wax and, later, he was then going to strip it off.  So he needed the actor to go and get the chemicals and equipment to go and strip off the wax.

He was somewhat impatient that the guy was so stupid and didn’t understand; Lars had had to spell out what he wanted.  I was trying to explain to the guy what to do and what Lars meant, as well as, the process involved.

When he did go away to get the things, I came over and approached Lars and assisted him in the painting of the work that he was doing.

*A rather insightful dream this one and the energies with Lars were, as ever, pleasant and sublime.  I find this a rather telling dream too because, in later years, on having Lars’s Michael Overleaves charted, I would learn that not only is he an old soul – first level old slave and entity mate to his equally old-souled father (Olaf Gamst) and sixth cast artisan like myself but he was the favoured muse of Doménicos (El Greco) Theotokópoulos and his chief assistant.

Naturally, for Lars to be so immersed creatively in a painterly fashion – in the dreamtime – was truly about revisiting a skill and time in the past which brought him great fulfillment both spiritually and creatively.  This was so clearly an astral plane encounter between us.

Being in Lars’s presence was quite expansive; you could actually feel his soul being deeply creative.  So fully dilated were his pupils, Lars’s eyes were almost pure black.  He was terribly eccentric and clearly there was much bleed-through from his having been greatly inspired in that lifetime by El Greco.  He worked feverishly with great attack.

He quite appreciated the fact that I was not a dolt and could be of able assistance to him.  This was such an astral plane encounter that it was as real and connected as that time we rode the subway together and the connectedness we shared blew my mind.

Incidentally, in that sixteenth century lifetime, Lars was much younger than the great artist and they did have a passionate relationship.  I have a distinct impression that there was a bleed through of what Lars looked like, in that lifetime, as his features were not as they are now; he was more Latin and darker, strong-nosed.

It was an aquiline nose.  Too, he was robust-energied and had massive hands like those of a sculptor’s.  Terribly expressive and passionate, too, were his hands.  END.

I was on the phone whilst speaking with Owen Hawksmoor, in this the fourth dream, and I could see about his apartment as we spoke.  I was calling him because I wanted to get laid and I was really raunchy and stir-crazy but he was not up to it.  I start calling him on it and I told him, “Oh yeah, why don’t you get up and go to the bathroom?  And drop your teeth in the glass of water, on your way, before you come back?”

In a very sarcastic manner, I had laced into him to which he responded by being coolly dismissive of me by broadly laughing at my desperation.

Somehow, Pandora da Braga was part of this dream and she had an awareness of my play for Owen and my resultant rejection.

*Featured art:  Santiago el mayor by El Greco.  At the time of the dream, Lars appeared as he did in a past life; his was a strong aquiline nose in the dream.  This look features prominently in many of El Greco’s works.  In that past life, Lars was a favoured muse, assistant and lover of El Greco’s who was in a recent incarnation the sublime American artist, Georgia O’Keeffe. 

As Lars is a slave soul, the look of St. Francis and also the look of Christ carrying the cross are those of a slave soul; at least that’s my impression.  Since, Christ was a seventh level king soul on his last life, the El Greco Christ of the aquiline nose is decidedly not a king soul and more so a slave with priestly airs.  Perhaps, this is how Lars looked then. 

What I also love about this particular El Greco painting is that the green draping proves an evocative prelude of things to come, as it were, with regards Georgia O’Keeffe’s sublimely sexualised flower paintings. 

For that matter, I love how Georgia O’Keeffe’s sensual masterpiece, Jack in the pulpit No. IV is a reanimation of El Greco’s Christ on the cross which is in the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, Japan.  END.  

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Art:  Santiago el Mayor

Oil on Canvas

97 x 77 cm

1610 El Greco

Provenance: Museo del Greco

Christ on the Cross

Oil on Canvas

95.5 x 61 cm

1600 El Greco

Provenance: National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, Japan

Jack in the Pulpit IV

Oil on Canvas

40 x 30 Inches

1930 Georgia O’Keeffe

Provenance: National Gallery of Art, Washington D. C.

Grey Lines with Black, Blue and Yellow

Oil on Canvas

48 x 30 Inches

© 1923 Georgia O’Keeffe

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© 2013-2025 Arvin da Brgha.  All Rights Reserved.  

Figure With Rays of Light (Arctic Form III)

artic forms III

Oil on Canvas

127.9 x 152.4 cm

© 1927 Lawren Harris

Provenance: Thomson Collection Art Gallery of Ontario

http://www.AGO.net

Not only is Lawren Harris my favourite member of the Group of Seven, this masterpiece happens to be my favourite Lawren Harris.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawren_Harris

http://www.gallery.ca/en/see/collections/artist.php?iartistid=2326

http://www.mcmichael.com/collection/seven/harris.cfm

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© 2013-2025 Arvin da Brgha.  All Rights Reserved.

Oyster Catcher.

Serigraph 24 x 30 Inches Edition: 91 © 2009 Robert Davidson Provenance: 5/91 Art collection Arvin da Brgha. Though I can’t abide oysters – any shellfish – I positively love the nautical signatures of this Haida masterpiece. _________________________________________________________________________ © 2013-2025 Arvin da Brgha.  All Rights Reserved.