Female artists like Frida Kahlo, Vali Myers, Hilma af Klint, Belkis Ayon, Remedios Varo, and others tapped into esoteric mysteries to create their art.
Vali Myers taken by Ed Van Der Elsken
Vali Myers was never going to be ordinary. Her talent, wayward spirit and shock of flame-red hair marked her out for a life less ordinary. Ordinary was nice and nice was boring and Vali Myers hated boring. But Vali had come from ordinary. She was born in Canterbury, Sydney, in 1930 to a wireless operator father and a talented violinist mother. Her mother had given up her career with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra to raise her family. Vali watched in growing horror as her mother slowly fell to pieces with the frustration of her small town life. Wives were expected to be drudges for the benefit of their husbands and nothing more. Her mother’s unraveling inspired Vali to focus on and nurture her own talents. She was good at art and loved to dance. She hated school and had difficulties with reading and writing. Her classmates thought her odd, but Vali thought them odd and frighteningly unimaginative. She quit home at fourteen and worked in a factory to finance her ambitions to become a dancer. Vali eventually became a principal dancer with the Melbourne Modern Ballet Company. This early success confirmed her belief there was more to life than...
The Art of Vali Myers As a child at a bush school in the Australian outback, Vali neglected lessons preferring to draw in the back of exercise books visions from her imagination. Self-taught, her very personal technique evolved slowly over the years. Vali’s drawings are created with the finest English pen nib (Gillott’s Crowquill 659) ... Read more
Originally scanned from The Photojournalist book (1974, ISBN 0690006209) Description of the photo, from the book : "A rapport with people has been evident in Mary Ellen's work from the very beginning. She does not feel she has to know people to photograph them. Using her camera as a tool of exploration, she learns about them and their lives. She will even approach strangers, as the photograph of Valli (sic) testifies. She had just started to photograph when she went to Europe in 1965. It was two years before pictures of flower children with gypsy clothes, beads and rings would become commonplace. Mary Ellen was sitting in a small restaurant in Positano, Southern Italy, when she saw a woman wearing an incredible assortment of necklaces and rings, dressed in a fashion that defied current fashion. It was all fantasy, from the tattoos on her head to the single flower she was holding. Mary Ellen knew she had to have a picture of that strange aura of innocence mingled with sadness. She approached the woman gently, asked if she might photograph her, and heard her name - Valli. They communicated easily ; Valli invited her to visit. A couple of days later they met and walked together up into the hills where Valli lived. She introduced Mary Ellen to her little fox and goats and showed her around her small, sad shack. Throughout the afternoon, Mary Ellen took photographs, and when evening came she knew that on many rolls of black-and-white film, plus a few of color, she had an exciting series of pictures. She returned to the United States a few weeks later. Before going home to New York, she stopped in Chicago to visit a friend. Anxious to see what she had captured, she put the black-and-white film in a developing tank, and then went out for an hour. When she came back , she had lost most of that afternoon in Italy. Another friend had come into the apartment, seen the tank, and in passing, opened it. All the film was wrecked. The photograph of Valli at the far left is the best survivor of the color take, To this day, the memory of that loss clouds Mary Ellen's face when she talks about it. "There are no words you can say when something like that happens. You feel so badly for your lost pictures, those that die."
Drawing by Vali
Dutch photographer and filmmaker Ed van der Elsken relocated to Paris in 1950. There he found a bohemian group and began closely following and photographing their everyday movements, intertwining fiction and reality in a new genre of photography book. The book focuses on the Left Bank of Paris at th
The Art of Vali Myers As a child at a bush school in the Australian outback, Vali neglected lessons preferring to draw in the back of exercise books visions from her imagination. Self-taught, her very personal technique evolved slowly over the years. Vali’s drawings are created with the finest English pen nib (Gillott’s Crowquill 659) ... Read more
Vali Myers was never going to be ordinary. Her talent, wayward spirit and shock of flame-red hair marked her out for a life less ordinary. Ordinary was nice and nice was boring and Vali Myers hated boring. But Vali had come from ordinary. She was born in Canterbury, Sydney, in 1930 to a wireless operator father and a talented violinist mother. Her mother had given up her career with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra to raise her family. Vali watched in growing horror as her mother slowly fell to pieces with the frustration of her small town life. Wives were expected to be drudges for the benefit of their husbands and nothing more. Her mother’s unraveling inspired Vali to focus on and nurture her own talents. She was good at art and loved to dance. She hated school and had difficulties with reading and writing. Her classmates thought her odd, but Vali thought them odd and frighteningly unimaginative. She quit home at fourteen and worked in a factory to finance her ambitions to become a dancer. Vali eventually became a principal dancer with the Melbourne Modern Ballet Company. This early success confirmed her belief there was more to life than...
"So called normality is my nightmare. However, as long as eccentrics exist, and thanks be to heaven there are still some, we can place our hopes in future." Gianni Menichetti "The witch
About Vali Myers Introduction “Let it all be animal, my life and death, hard and clean like that, anything but human… a lot I care, me with my red heart in the dark earth and my tattooed feet following the animal ways.” Diary entry, 1963 — Vali Myers was a unique spirit born out of ... Read more
From conservative Melbourne to the Bohemian underworld of Paris’ Rive Gauche, and a wild mountain hideaway in Positano, Vali Myers led a life like no other. Heralded as the original hippy and…
Vali Myers, an Australian-born dancer addicted to opium, entranced midcentury Paris and her spirit has been rediscovered by fashion designers.
Vali Myers was never going to be ordinary. Her talent, wayward spirit and shock of flame-red hair marked her out for a life less ordinary. Ordinary was nice and nice was boring and Vali Myers hated boring. But Vali had come from ordinary. She was born in Canterbury, Sydney, in 1930 to a wireless operator father and a talented violinist mother. Her mother had given up her career with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra to raise her family. Vali watched in growing horror as her mother slowly fell to pieces with the frustration of her small town life. Wives were expected to be drudges for the benefit of their husbands and nothing more. Her mother’s unraveling inspired Vali to focus on and nurture her own talents. She was good at art and loved to dance. She hated school and had difficulties with reading and writing. Her classmates thought her odd, but Vali thought them odd and frighteningly unimaginative. She quit home at fourteen and worked in a factory to finance her ambitions to become a dancer. Vali eventually became a principal dancer with the Melbourne Modern Ballet Company. This early success confirmed her belief there was more to life than...
"So called normality is my nightmare. However, as long as eccentrics exist, and thanks be to heaven there are still some, we can place our hopes in future." Gianni Menichetti "The witch
The Art of Vali Myers As a child at a bush school in the Australian outback, Vali neglected lessons preferring to draw in the back of exercise books visions from her imagination. Self-taught, her very personal technique evolved slowly over the years. Vali’s drawings are created with the finest English pen nib (Gillott’s Crowquill 659) ... Read more
Vali Myers was never going to be ordinary. Her talent, wayward spirit and shock of flame-red hair marked her out for a life less ordinary. Ordinary was nice and nice was boring and Vali Myers hated boring. But Vali had come from ordinary. She was born in Canterbury, Sydney, in 1930 to a wireless operator father and a talented violinist mother. Her mother had given up her career with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra to raise her family. Vali watched in growing horror as her mother slowly fell to pieces with the frustration of her small town life. Wives were expected to be drudges for the benefit of their husbands and nothing more. Her mother’s unraveling inspired Vali to focus on and nurture her own talents. She was good at art and loved to dance. She hated school and had difficulties with reading and writing. Her classmates thought her odd, but Vali thought them odd and frighteningly unimaginative. She quit home at fourteen and worked in a factory to finance her ambitions to become a dancer. Vali eventually became a principal dancer with the Melbourne Modern Ballet Company. This early success confirmed her belief there was more to life than...
Witch. Sophia worshipping, earth mother lover. I post the magickal and mystical. Beauty fortifies the spirit. Message me if you want.
"So called normality is my nightmare. However, as long as eccentrics exist, and thanks be to heaven there are still some, we can place our hopes in future." Gianni Menichetti "The witch
"So called normality is my nightmare. However, as long as eccentrics exist, and thanks be to heaven there are still some, we can place our hopes in future." Gianni Menichetti "The witch
The Art of Vali Myers As a child at a bush school in the Australian outback, Vali neglected lessons preferring to draw in the back of exercise books visions from her imagination. Self-taught, her very personal technique evolved slowly over the years. Vali’s drawings are created with the finest English pen nib (Gillott’s Crowquill 659) ... Read more
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The Dutch photographer’s joyful and intimate images of young bohemians captured the lives, loves and struggles of those immersed a global counterculture
Vali Myers was never going to be ordinary. Her talent, wayward spirit and shock of flame-red hair marked her out for a life less ordinary. Ordinary was nice and nice was boring and Vali Myers hated boring. But Vali had come from ordinary. She was born in Canterbury, Sydney, in 1930 to a wireless operator father and a talented violinist mother. Her mother had given up her career with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra to raise her family. Vali watched in growing horror as her mother slowly fell to pieces with the frustration of her small town life. Wives were expected to be drudges for the benefit of their husbands and nothing more. Her mother’s unraveling inspired Vali to focus on and nurture her own talents. She was good at art and loved to dance. She hated school and had difficulties with reading and writing. Her classmates thought her odd, but Vali thought them odd and frighteningly unimaginative. She quit home at fourteen and worked in a factory to finance her ambitions to become a dancer. Vali eventually became a principal dancer with the Melbourne Modern Ballet Company. This early success confirmed her belief there was more to life than...
Vali Myers, Il Porto 1969
"The center of life is female - we all come from our mothers. I've always drawn women or female spirits. I feel deeply about this - who gives a damn about some guy on a cross? My mother's creativity was smothered after she married and raised a family, but she was supportive of me - even my father expected me to carry on in her footsteps. I prefer to have no kids but lots of animals." - Vali Myers, via an 1994 article by Alex Burns found here After the relatively mechanical compositions of Louis Nevelson, we now arrive on the other side of the artistic spectrum, where we find Vali Myers, an Australian artist, who was born in 1930 and died several years ago, at the age of 73. A pale skinned, red-haired beauty, she was similar to Nevelson, however, in the way that she was known as much for her notorious style as she was for her art; tattooing her face and hands long before "tribal" was so radically chic, and dressing like the mad gypsy she was, dripping with beads and bangles. Legend has it that she also tattooed a thunderbolt on rocker/poet Patti Smith's knee in memory of Crazy Horse, the celebrated Lakota warrior. She fostered numerous animals; some domestic, some wild. Her familiar or totem animal was the fox. Legend also has it that she owned a large indoor cage, but it was not for her four-legged companions; it was the place she went to do her art - works that were completed in pen and ink using an actual feather quill. Born in Melbourne, and growing up in Sydney, Australia, she left home at 14 and gravitated to Paris where she struggled as a dancer, and struggled with Parisian authorities over the lack of a visa. After spending time in a French prison she was deported, and went wandering across Europe. During a second trip to Paris, and now married to the son of a Hungarian gypsy, she befriended such notables as Jean Cocteau, Jean Genet and Sartre. She also befriended opium, and when this "friendship" turned sour, she relocated once again, this time to Italy, to the Positano valley. This became the turning point in her life for it was there that she bonded with an orphaned fox - a relationship that was to last longer than her marriage - and begin the body of work that she is known for today. She took a teenaged lover at this time - possibly over 20 years her junior - artist Gianni Menichetti, who remained her close companion for the next 30 years, (Menichetti still maintains their original property). They lived for the most part in Positano, once again battling government officials in their efforts to have the valley declared a preserve by the World Wildlife Fund. (They succeeded.) Meanwhile, in an effort to sell her artwork, Myers began traveling to Manhattan, occasionally living in the infamous Chelsea Hotel. She was to become the darling of many of the 70's elite... attracting the likes of Andy Warhol, George Plimpton, Dali, Mick Jagger, and Marianne Faithful, to name a few. But, eventually she would come full circle and return to Australia where she lived and worked - and commuted to Positano - till she contracted a terminal stomach cancer in 2003. Hers, however, was not really a tragic ending... she died in a Melbourne hospital the same way she lived: fearlessly, and, at the same time, with a sense of humor. Her dying wish was to bequeath the remainder of her life's work to the "great... no bullshit... people of Victoria". These and other examples of Vali Myers' work can be found here. (For larger views of two images below, click on the images) Unlike Louise Nevelson's spare, monochromatic, rectilinear structures, Myer's creations (samples above) were bold, colorful, neo-primative expressions which very often employed the spiral motif and intricate lattice patterns echoing her own tattoos. As it was, many of her images were self-portraits, or visions of herself amid her beloved animals; illuminations that were more informed by the ancient traditions of ritualistic magic than they were by the black-lit psychedelia of her time. Unlike the fashionista of today, Meyers reveled in her spiritualism, a spiritualism that welled up from her like fathomless spring. Had Aliester Crowely been alive, I think he would've turned to Myers to illustrate his famous Tarot. As a budding artist, I remember first discovering her in the pages of a magazine - I don't remember which - and deciding at once that she was the sort of artist I wanted to be. Of course, when all is said and done, I could never be a Vali Myers... so effortlessly bold, so self-assured, so demonstratively passionate. Vali Myers was that one class act that can't be followed. Other resources not previously linked to: A review of Gianni Menichetti's "Vali Myers: A Memoir" by Louis Landes Levi The Final Dream of a Bohemian Princess by James Norman The Outre Gallery page with more examples of Myers' work Articles found here, and here, and here. "Letter to Diane & Shelley from Vali" Note: I was amazed at how many blog entries I found regarding Vali Myers, while researching this post... many of them dated from earlier this year... a veritable Myers constellation!
A site dedicated to my love and appreciation of Vali Myers. Please feel free to submit or share your own art/words/connection with Vali. This blog also functions as a community and I love hearing from you! None of the pictures in this blog are mine unless otherwise stated. Please click each...
Vali Myers by Ed Van Der Elsken
