Feeding a Glass Furnace (“Feeding the Tank”), Consumers Glass Co. Ltd., Ville Saint-Pierre, P.Q.

Taylor first started working on his depictions of wartime industry in 1941. He described that experience in an article published in a 1945 issue of the magazine Canadian Art: “The sounds, the noise, the smells and the dirt, the heat and the cold, the machines, the interminable questioning and the interminable repetition of explanations, and the danger, impose a serious strain upon artists in industry. Changing lighting, models always on the move, frequent interruptions, the cumulative effect upon one of all these factors is often overwhelming. But it amounts to the same thing as writing a poem or a musical composition or painting a picture of a bowl of flowers in your studio, a landscape or a street scene. You successfully produce and profit in proportion to the effort expended. And the rich human relationships you enjoy in company with the workers pay huge dividends.”