Vali Myers
1930–2003 · Australian drawing and ink artist, dancer and bohemian muse
Vali Myers (Sydney, 1930 – Melbourne, 2003) was an Australian artist known for her flamboyant fantasy drawings in pen and ink and watercolour, as well as for her work as a nightclub dancer. She is remembered for her bohemian life and for becoming a muse to several creative figures of her time, receiving most of her media attention in Europe and the United States during the 1950s and 1960s.
Born in Canterbury, in the Sydney area, she showed artistic talent early and later trained as a dancer in Melbourne. In 1949, aged nineteen, she went to post-war Paris to pursue dance and ended up living on the streets of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, on the Left Bank. This period is documented in Love on the Left Bank, a book of photographs by Ed van der Elsken in which she is the heroine.
Her work moved from early detailed monochrome drawings to a range of vivid colours, including watercolour and gold leaf, depicting a personal spirit world. She split her life between Melbourne, the Hotel Chelsea in New York, a fourteenth-century cottage at Il Porto near Positano, and Paris. Her acquaintances included Tennessee Williams, Salvador Dalí and Patti Smith.
After marrying the Austrian Rudi Rappold, she settled in Positano with her later partner, the Italian artist Gianni Menichetti, who helped turn the property into a wildlife sanctuary. Around 1993 she returned to Melbourne, opened a studio there, and died in the city in 2003.
Her legacy lives on in documentary films about her life, in several publications, and in her influence on later artists, among them Patti Smith and Florence Welch.