Youth On Fire is an early example of Valentine’s experimentation, containing a small epoxy resin butterfly overlaid on oil paint in the bottom left corner of the canvas. The work was exhibited in cities across the U.S. and Canada in the early 1960s as part of the travelling Bermuda Art Exhibition, sponsored by Eastern Airlines, at a time when very few artists, and certainly none in Bermuda, were working with such innovative materials. Reflecting on her work in plastics, Valentine told the Bermuda Sun in 1969, “Plastics have become an artform, which they weren’t considered to be when I first started, and this pleases me very much.”
