impurities in it that caused striations in the glass; these he felt, distracted from the appreciation of the sculptures. In subsequent series of fabricated glass sculptures Taylor created his forms in borosilicate glass, the same substance of which Pyrex laboratory glass is made. Transitional work At the beginning of the 1980s Taylor's work in glass turned to classic vessel forms based on ancient Greek kraters, lekythoi and amphoras. At first the surfaces of these bulging forms displayed colorful spots and splotches that contrasted with the solid body color of the vessels; but a trip to the desert regions of Idaho and Oregon influenced Taylor to wrap the surfaces of his vessels in landscape-like configurations of color. In 1980 Taylor returned briefly to ceramic, folding and draping slabs of porcelain into twisting, gestural forms. These he airbrushed in black and brown glazes to emphasize the forms' depth. Mature work In 1982, Taylor moved to Rochester, New York, to head the glass program at Rochester Institute of Technology's College of Fine and Applied Arts. He returned to the symmetry and precision of his machine-like glass constructions, this time finding inspiration in the world of medicine and surgery. His "Surgical Expansion" series, fabricated from factory-manufactured plate glass and glass tubing, featured scalpel-sharp pieces of beveled glass sheathed, and yet perfectly visible, inside transparent glass cylinders. Color began to come into these transparent pieces with the use of tinted industrial glass in peach, solar gray, solar bronze and blue as well as colorless glass. By 1983, he was laminating squares and rectangles of different colors of glass together to create tonal variations within a single work. In the mid-1980s, Taylor was using bright color in small sections to focus the viewer's attention on central or connecting parts in a sculpture's composition. At that time, he used the prefix "photo-" in his titles, as in "Photogenesis," "Photoreceptor" and "Photogenerator", to emphasize the interaction of light with his prismatic creations. Since that time, Taylor's work has increased in compositional complexity. Cast pieces of flawless cast optical glass came into his repertoire in the late 1980s, and these, laminated with thin layers of brilliant color, became the basis of his work after 1991. Influences The artist has said that the off-center balance of his sculptures was influenced early on, when he saw the series "Bottled Spirits" by the German glass artist Erwin Eisch. Taylor said that Eisch's