Arty Farty Friday ~ Vali Myers

It's good to find an artist who is likely to have a very distinctive astro-signature, to discover whether that, in fact, is the case. This lady could fit that description:

Vali Myers, an Australian visionary artist, dancer, bohemian and muse of the 1950s and 60s in Europe and the USA.

Born: 2 August 1930, Canterbury, Sydney, Australia. Died: 12 February 2003 (age 72).
A website dedicated to this lady is HERE, and contains biographical material, with examples of her paintings.

From that website:

Vali Myers was a unique spirit born out of time. She lived her extraordinary life like a bright flame, cutting her own unique path and living on her own terms: a tightrope walker - one foot in this world and one in a dreamworld that we can only glimpse in her profound artwork.

Artist, dancer, shamaness, muse and powerful creatrix, Vali left a body of work which started with her early drawings in the cafes of Paris in 1950 and spanned till her death in 2003.

"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)

From the blurb at Amazon about Vali Myers: A Memoir by Gianni Menichetti :

The Australian artist, Vali Meyers, was a legend in her own time. Premiere danseuse of the Melbourne Modern Ballet at seventeen, she left home and spent ten years in Paris, living much of the time on the streets but never ceasing to draw. Ed van der Elskin famously put her on the cover of his Love on the Left Bank, that manifesto of Paris in the 1950's and her work was praised by George Plimpton in his Paris Review. Then, saying good-bye to all that, she spent forty years in semi-seclusion in a wild canyon in Italy, where she continued producing her minute, mystical, and passionate drawings. Tough as nails, she fought the local authorities who wanted to introduce loggers into the valley, after a long struggle succeeding in having it designated an Environmental Oasis. Finally, Vali returned triumphant to her native Melbourne, where she was recognized as an artist sui generis. In this brilliant memoir by her friend and lover, Gianni Menichetti, her art, times, and personality come through unforgettably.

There's a post about this artist at a blog called Roses and Vellum. The blogger has read the Vali Myers' biography mentioned above. Mention of the artist's positive and negative characteristics there could highlight other parts of the natal chart shown below.

A taste of her style - more at Google Image or the website linked above.

 The Golden Toad

ASTROLOGY (briefly):

Born in Canterbury, Sydney, Australia on 2 August 1930. Time unknown, chart set for noon.

Her natal chart, it turns out, is not as dramatically representative of her as I'd hoped it might be. I'd suspected Sun conjunct Uranus, or some prominent Aquarius planets. What she had was Leo Sun trining Uranus in Aries. Uranus could have been in a strong area of the chart, close to an angle, but that's not possible to establish without time of birth. Aquarius might have been rising, I guess.

Moon's position cannot be pin-pointed without time of birth but would have been somewhere in Scorpio. If within orb of sextile to Venus (planet of the arts), a Yod with Uranus at its apex would emerge, throwing more emphasis on planet of the unexpected and of eccentricity.

Perhaps the conjunction of creative, dreamy Neptune and Mercury, planet of communication (though in adjoining signs) is more representative of this lady's art style and bohemian lifestyle.

The Saturn-Jupiter opposition, a push-pull between planet of seriousness and restriction and planet of joviality and excess, might reflect the balance in some of Myers' more negative characteristics, as described in the post at Roses and Vellum.