BY CLAIRE SHEPHERD OCTOBER 30, 2024

Vali and her Fox, 1972, photograph, by Rudi Rappold © Vali Myers Art Gallery Trust

A Lesson in True Bohemianism with the Witch of Positano – Don’t Be A Tourist – Messy Nessy Chic

Every so often, an original is born; timeless, defying genre and completely of themself. Vali Myers, artist, dancer, environmentalist, bohemian and muse, was as original as they come, inspiring writers, artists and musicians from the streets of a post Second World War Paris to her bohemian coven in the wild canyons above Positano. Forming friendships with the avant-garde from Dali to Patti Smith, it seems that everyone who met Vali was captivated by the elfin-faced, flame-haired maverick known as the “witch of Positano”.

Vali Myers’ homestead in the mountains above Positano © One Stone House

Born in Sydney, Australia in 1930 to a violinist mother and a father who was a marine wireless operator, Vali’s early upbringing, unlike the woman herself, was fairly unsensational. Determined to follow a career in dance, she soon figured out that rather than fight with her parents forever, she’d have to flee the nest. At only fourteen, Vali left home for Melbourne, grafting in factories to pay for her dance lessons. She quickly became the lead dancer in the Melbourne Modern Ballet Company, but feeling stifled once more by the place she called home, in 1949, at the age of nineteen, she fled again, much further this time, boarding a ship to Paris.

Vali Myers in Paris

In 1950, Vali landed in an impoverished, post-war Paris. There were no jobs and she found herself struggling to survive with the city’s incoming wave of war refugees; finding a family amongst Romany people and displaced Jews from across Europe. She spent the next ten years on Paris’s streets, frequenting cafés of the Left Bank in the daytime and dancing for money in nightclubs, where she felt a connection with her new friends – misfits on the fringes of society – that lasted her entire life. All that she possessed were some clothes, a knife for protection and a sketchbook, small enough to carry around, both of which she took wherever she went. […]

The story continues…: A Lesson in True Bohemianism with the Witch of Positano