Vali Myers

• https://www.valimyerstrust.com/about-vali-myers/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vali_Myers
• https://www.artandtrash.ca/episodes/vali
• https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0616886/
• https://strangeflowers.wordpress.com/2012/05/08/the-valley-of-vali-...
• https://witchofpositano.tumblr.com/

a/k/a Vali, "Witch of Positiano."

Myers was an Australian artist, dancer, bohemian and muse whose coverage by the media was mostly in 1950s and 1960s in Europe and the United States.

Early Life

Myers was born in Canterbury, Sydney, on 2 August 1930, to a violinist mother and marine wireless operator father. She displayed a talent for art at an early age. The family moved to Box Hill, Melbourne in 1941 and Myers left home at 14.

After working in factories to support her dance lessons, she became immersed in dance and later became the leading dancer for the Melbourne Modern Ballet Company. In 1949 at age 19 Myers travelled to impoverished post-war Paris to pursue a dance career but found herself living on the streets of the Saint-Germain-des-Prés Quarter on the Left Bank. Love on the Left Bank is a 1954 book of photographs from Dutch photographer Ed van der Elsken (1925–1990), documenting the bohemian life on the Rive Gauche of Paris; Myers is the heroine of this semi-biographical roman à clef, and is also photographed along with some of her early drawings.

Career

Myers was a flamboyant fantasy artist who worked in pen and ink and watercolour as well as being a nightclub dancer. She divided her life between her adopted home of Melbourne, the Hotel Chelsea in New York City, a 14th-century cottage at Il Porto, near Positano and a residence in Paris.

Her art works developed from early detailed monochromes to a full range of vibrant colors and tones extending to watercolor and gold leaf, displaying a "fastidiously rendered depiction of a personal spirit world." She was acquainted with many celebrities including Tennessee Williams, Salvador Dalí, Django Reinhardt, Jean Cocteau, Patti Smith, Jean Genet and Sam Shepard.

Myers' paintings have sold for up to $US40,000 ($A68,000) in New York. Her work was held in the Stuyvesant collection in the Netherlands, New York's Hurryman Collection, and is owned by private collectors such as George Plimpton and Mick Jagger.

Personal Life

While in Europe she married Rudi Rappold, an Austrian from Vienna, and moved to Positano. The marriage ended, and later her lover, Italian artist Gianni Menichetti moved in and helped turn the property into a wildlife sanctuary that was endorsed by the World Wildlife Fund.

Later, after she began having seizures, she returned to Melbourne in 1993, and opened a studio in the Nicholas Building; only returning to Positano occasionally.

Death

Vali Myers died in Melbourne on 12 February 2003 shortly after being diagnosed with cancer at the age of 72.

On 18 January 2003, a month before Myers' death, The Age newspaper printed an article about her life. The article concluded with the following quote from Myers: I've had 72 absolutely flaming years. It [the illness] doesn't bother me at all, because, you know, love, when you've lived like I have, you've done it all. I put all my effort into living; any dope can drop dead. I'm in the hospital now, and I guess I'll kick the bucket here. Every beetle does it, every bird, everybody. You come into the world and then you go.

LUMA

An exhibition of her work was held at LUMA (La Trobe University Museum of Art) in 2013. The show, Between Dusk and Dawn was a personal retrospective that included works from private collections in the US and Europe and ran in September and October.

Books

• Myers, Vali, 1930–2003 Drawings 1949–79 / Vali Myers. London : Open House, 1980: ISBN 0-905664-25-6
• Macintosh, M. & Jones, G. (ed), "Night Flower: The Life and Art of Vali Myers" Melbourne: Outre Gallery Press, 2012 : ISBN 978-0-9751078-9-8
• Menichetti, Gianni, Vali Myers Memoirs Fresno, CA: Golda Foundation, 2006 : ISBN 0-9785606-0-4
• Van Der Elsken, Ed, Love on the Left Bank Amsterdam: Bezige Bij, 1956 : ISBN 978-1-899235-22-3
• Filmography
• Vali, The Witch of Positano – 1965. A film by Sheldon and Diane Rochlin, co-produced by George Plimpton. Winner, Documentary Film Category, 1965 Mannheim Film Festival. (Duration: 65 minutes)
• The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda – 1968. Experimental film by Ira Cohen. (Duration: 22 minutes)
• Dope – 1968. A film by Sheldon and Diane Rochlin. A documentary about a young London woman's drug addiction in the late 1960s. Vali Myers appears in scenes throughout the documentary.
• Death in Port Jackson Hotel – 1971. A film by Ed van der Elsken. Features Vali in her "savage paradise", Il Porto, the canyon near Positano where she created her artwork. (Duration: 36 minutes) [2]
• Patti and Vali – 1973. A short film/documentary by Sandra Dailey. The film shows Patti Smith having her knee cap tattooed by Vali, and also features an off screen commentary by Smith. (Duration: 30 minutes)
• Vali's World 1984. Telltales Video Documentary by Fred Cushing & Caterine Milinaire ( 55 minutes)
• Vali: The Tightrope Dancer – 1989. A documentary by Australian filmmaker Ruth Cullen. (Duration: 58 minutes)
• Painted Lady – 2002. Ruth Cullen's follow up to The Tightrope Dancer, a documentary that follows Vali at her studio and with friends like Lee Fuhler. (Duration: 27 minutes)

Legacy

Vali Myers was a huge inspiration to the young Patti Smith, whose walls were covered in pictures of and by Vali Myers. When they met in New York, Vali tattooed Patti with a lightning bolt on her knee cap. This was filmed by Sandra Dailey who also filmed the infamous piercing of Robert Mapplethorpe's nipple.

Vali was the inspiration behind the character of Carol in Tennessee Williams' play Orpheus Descending.

Vali is also mentioned in Marianne Faithfull's 1994 autobiography Faithfull.

The song "Ballerina Valerie" by Joni Mitchell is about Vali.

British singer Florence Welch stated that Vali was a big influence for Florence and The Machine's third studio album, How Big How Blue How Beautiful.

Vali Myers was the inspiration of the Ching Ho Cheng painting "Queenie" which is in the permanent collection at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

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Vali's unique journey originated in 1930, when she was born in Sydney, Australia. At 14, she left home, working as a factory worker in Melbourne, while trying to make a career as a dancer in the Melbourne Modern Dance Troop. The highlight during this part of her dance odyssey was a solo performance at Albert Hall in London. In post Word War II, 1949, 19 year-old Vali moved to Paris, France.

Vali's chosen friends were orphan vagabonds who ruled the streets during the dreary post war days. She met Jean Genet, Tennessee Williams, Salvador Dali, Jean-Paul Sartre, Alan Ginsburg, but considered most of these celebrity personalities to be dilettantes striving to be too cool, too safe and too protected within the confines of Parisian Cafe Society. Vali preferred an extreme outsider position and the dangerous after-hour African Dance Clubs.

The artist who affected her most was Jean Cocteau, because Vali's boyfriend "cared" for Cocteau's opium pipe. After Cocteau had finished smoking, Vali and her boyfriend, a Hungarian Gypsy, smoked the dross left behind in the pipe and she became addicted. "I did not see the light of day for three years," she said, looking down at her tattooed feet. After living the addicted, hard, Bohemian street life, getting arrested and being on file with Interpol, it was die or leave. She left Paris in 1958.

George Plimpton was inspired by Vali, and wrote about her early years in Paris. In Paris Review # 18, he wrote, "She is the symbol and plaything of the restless, confused, vice-enthralled, demi-monde that was the personalization of something torn and loose and deep-down primitive in all of us." Plimpton also included Vali's exquisite drawings in his Review. Ed van der Elsken, in his 1958 historic book Love on the Left Bank, captured Vali Myers as the self-absorbed drug addict.

With the help of Jean Cocteau, Vali and her new husband, Austrian architect Rudi Rapport, got Vali's legal papers in order and made their way to II Porto, close to the town of Positano, in southern Italy. Here they discovered a secluded valley with a small, Moorish monk's summer house, a waterfall, caves and hundreds of animals all protected by a menacing, sheer, 1,000-foot, high rock cliffs with a difficult-to-navigate goat path that afforded guarded entry to her hidden Garden of Eden.

Vali worked on her self-absorbed, highly illustrative, dark, brooding, mystical, psychedelic, animal-inspired sexy images, all done on handmade paper, sketched out with fine English ink nibs stuck in the end of a goose feather, using hand ground Chinese black ink to make the drawings. Vali sometimes worked several years on a single art work. Then, when it was time to make some money, she would put on her finest silk scarves, her flowing multi layered dresses adorned with large chunks of gold and amber jewelry, and head for the Chelsea Hotel in New York to sell her work and communicate with the outside world.

Slinking in a chair, drinking gin and rubbing thick black kohl around her eyes, she greeted guests to her Chelsea apartment, socialized and did business salon-style, with troupes of artists and interesting notables passing through. Her dark eye-socket lid and liner became a popular look during the 1990 Goth music period. Her dark eyes kept the evil spirits away.

Once, when Vali was in New York, local bad boys sneaked in to her secret valley and killed some of her favorite dogs. The town of Positano was strictly Catholic and Vali was a certified witch who belonged to an ancient coven in England. In revenge for her animals' deaths, Vali hand picked tattoos with the names of her dead dogs on her feet and danced barefoot around the town. With her flowing dress, her flaming orange-red hair, her tattooed face and her tattooed feet, Vali psychologically shocked all the town's people and a truce was drawn. They made peace.

Vali tattooed her own face, because she felt that the only person who should tattoo their face was the person who would wear the tattoo. Eventually, her pet fox and goat died. She memorialized them by tattooing their names on the back of her hands. All of Vali's tattoos were hand-picked, including a number of tattoos that she did on other people; Ira Cohen, mystic poet, photographer and publisher of the early beats for one.