Tracy Spinks
By Tracy Spinks, BA (Hons) 2002, current PhD candidate
Photo: Fairfax Photo Library
Tracy Spinks got more than she bargained for when she chose the eccentric Australian-born artist Vali Myers as the subject of her Art History Program PhD thesis. This is an extract from a moving memoir:
'I felt completely fraudulent. There was no point in trying to explain to the busy nurses of the casualty department that I was a postgraduate art history student and that the 72-year-old woman next to me, with untamed long red hair, her eyes smeared with a rim of black kohl, and facial tattoos, was the subject of my thesis.
I'd met the Australian-born artist Vali Myers at her Swanston St studio only six months earlier and had, admittedly, spent hours poring over her journals, which spanned some 44 years, the time she had spent away from the country, outside Positano in Italy.
I whispered as I filled out the admission forms: 'Val... they want to know your next of kin'. She flashed me a look with her extraordinary large green eyes and replied, 'you luv'. I was overwhelmingly flattered but out of my depth - my undergraduate degree had in no way prepared me for this.
I had planned to conduct my research, and meander along in the role of the observer, but Vali, with her commanding, exuberant personality was never going to be an easy-going participant. For every question I had for her she had two for me. I was challenged, criticised, intimidated, nurtured and adopted by her. This wasn't just history; this was audience participation with boots on.
I first learned about Vali when I saw a film by Australian filmmaker Ruth Cullen, who had followed Vali from her apartment at the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan, where she sold work to high-profile celebrities, before returning to Italy. Quite apart from her flamboyant style of dress and highly public self-fashioned persona, Vali was a recluse who claimed to prefer the company of animals. She had over 40 dogs, two donkeys, goats, pigs, cats, ducks, chickens and her pet fox.
Myers' art is comparable to that of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Both used self-portraiture to explore personal identity and exorcise their experiences of pain and suffering. Myers worked exclusively in pen and coloured ink, painstakingly applied in a miniaturist style to produce deeply personal works of herself, her lovers, her home and animals. She rejected categorisation, preferring to be considered an outsider artist.
She was far from artistically naÔve and her work reveals a debt to Pre-Raphaelite artists such as Aubrey Beardsley and the Viennese Fantastic Realists. She perceived herself as an artist shaman, one who used her art as a tool with which to heal herself.
Vali spent a lifetime evading conventions, flaunting her disregard for conformity.
Gaining a perspective on her life and art was crucial to my research and the only way to achieve this had been to visit the home she had created in a one-roomed domed pavilion. After walking a couple of kilometres beyond the fishing village of Positano, I disappeared up a dirt path that ascended steeply between two cliff faces. Howling dogs heralded my arrival. There was no electricity, no plumbing, no kitchen, no bathroom and no toilet. She cooked on an outdoor fire and washed, without regularity, in the creek.
Time seemed irrelevant. Vali worked amid the rhythms of nature, using a white goose feather, attached to a fine-point nib.
Vali believed that 'if it weren't for the drawing I would have died years ago'. She was referring to the years spent as a vagrant in Paris. Vali mixed with an eclectic group of writers, artists and petty criminals. Among those she called friends were Jean Cocteau and Jean Genet.
Diagnosed with cancer, she gave an interview to report her illness and declare her dying wish to leave her drawings to the Australian people. She wasn't afraid of death: 'It's harder to live than die.'
Her last words to me were of thanks: 'It's a miracle baby that you came along and you just wanted to look at my work and diaries and everything... and ended up getting me into hospital.' She wouldn't believe me, but she gave me much more than I ever gave to her.
(A link to the original source of the text)