Arthur Wesley Dow introduced Georgia O'Keeffe to design principles that strongly shaped her abstraction. Dow emphasized composition, line, tone, and color rather than requiring students to copy nature in a strictly realistic way.
O'Keeffe encountered Dow's ideas through his teaching and through his influential book Composition. His approach gave her a framework for creating art from simplified forms and relationships. In 1915, she made a group of charcoal drawings that pushed beyond conventional representation and helped establish her independent artistic direction.
Dow was not the same teacher as William Merritt Chase, who instructed O'Keeffe at the Art Students League in New York. Chase represented a more academic tradition, while Dow's principles encouraged the freedom and structural clarity that became central to O'Keeffe's modernist work.