ABSTRACT
Arthur Wesley Dow, a prominent figure in the American arts and crafts culture with his New England landscapes, woodcut prints, and applied arts, taught painting as composition. He identified two misconceptions as to the nature of fine art. One was that art is representation and that there is an expectation for art to have a communicative accuracy just as we rely on grammar to ensure common understandings in language. The other misconception as to the nature of art, according to Dow, was that it is directly linked to science. Dow's preferred pedagogy was the use of some – indistinct – guiding principles and the individual's experience of the relevant phenomenon before drawing. Dow's concept of abstraction empowered the students to experiment with the basic relations, so that they could come up with their own experiences. Dow was critical of conventional ways of teaching art and academicism. Differently, Denman Ross's work displayed more of an interest in the intellectual apparatus.
