of Fine Arts Vienna on a Fulbright grant. When he returned to the United States, he worked as an art teacher at the University of Massachusetts. Close moved to New York City in 1967 and established himself in SoHo. Work Style [[Image:Chuck Close 2.jpg|thumb|350px|'Lucas (1986–1987), oil and graphite on canvas. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York. Detail at right of eye. Representative of his "later, more colorful and painterly style", "the elements of the picture are seen as separate abstract markings" when viewed close-up, while simultaneously maintaining the illusion of a realistic portrait at a distance. The pencil grid and thin undercoat of blue is visible beneath the splotchy "pixels." The painting's subject is fellow artist Lucas Samaras.]] Throughout his career, Close expanded his contribution to portraiture through the mastery of such varied drawing and painting techniques as ink, graphite, pastel, watercolor, conté crayon, finger painting, and stamp-pad ink on paper; printmaking techniques, such as mezzotint, etching, woodcuts, linocuts, and silkscreens; as well as handmade paper collage, Polaroid photographs, daguerreotypes, and Jacquard tapestries. His early airbrush techniques inspired the development of the ink jet printer. Close had been known for his skillful brushwork as a graduate student at Yale University. There, he emulated Willem de Kooning and seemed "destined to become a third-generation abstract expressionist, although with a dash of Pop iconoclasm". After a period in which he experimented with figurative constructions, Close began a series of paintings derived from black-and-white photographs of a female nude, which he copied onto canvas and painted in color. As he explained in a 2009 interview with Cleveland, Ohio's The Plain Dealer newspaper, he made a choice in 1967 to make art hard for himself and force a personal artistic breakthrough by abandoning the paintbrush. "I threw away my tools", Close said. "I chose to do things I had no facility with. The choice not to do something is in a funny way more positive than the choice to do something. If you impose a limit to not do something you've done before, it will push you to where you've never gone before." One photo of Philip Glass was included in his resulting black-and-white series in 1969, redone with watercolors in 1977, again redone with stamp pad and fingerprints in 1978, and also done as gray handmade paper in 1982. Working from a gridded photograph, he built his images by applying one