Valentine was part of a group of Los Angeles based artists who, in the 1960s, became renowned for adopting new materials and innovative fabrication processes, often borrowed from the industrial world. The sensuous colors and beautiful, pristine surfaces that were often painstakingly achieved by these artists earned them the label Finish Fetish. Although Valentine has been associated with this loose group, and later with the Light and Space artists, his artistic sensitivity was also independent and somewhat fully formed when he moved to L.A. in 1965. By then, he was already a recognized sculptor in his native state, Colorado, and had established dialogues and friendships with some of the major East Coast artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, and Carl Andre. He had also already started working with plastics. As early as 1950, he had started making jewelry with cast polyester resin, a semi-transparent material that could be molded, delicately colored, and extensively polished to create a wide range of prismatic effects. He continued to work with polyester resin through the 1960s and well into the 1970s. The ability of the material to transmit, diffuse, or refract light was perfectly suited to Valentine’s artistic pursuit: the creation of objects that allowed the viewer to “become involved with both the inside space and the outside space or surface—where most sculpture visually stops.” The Southern California landscapes, with the omnipresence of light, immense skies, and vast ocean views, became a unique source of artistic inspiration for him, and one that was in perfect synergy with the medium he had already chosen. As he famously said, “All the work is about the sea and the sky. I would like to have some way, a magic saw, to cut out large chunks of ocean or sky and say, ‘Here it is.’” This particular work was the maquette for a larger gray column; and was exhibited together with that work at the Getty Center as part of Pacific Standard Time in 2010-11.
