Elsie Driggs was inspired by the formal structure of technology, the machine, and the city. A vivid childhood memory of seeing the Pittsburgh skyline riddled with steel mills and smoke inspired Driggs to paint Blast Furnaces. When she returned to the site 20 years later, she observed the mill from a hill above her old boardinghouse and wrote that she “looked directly . . . into these big forms, and I kept finding them beautiful and wondering why. I told myself I wasn’t supposed to find a factory beautiful, but I did.”