Brown’s interest in theater was as much conceptual as it was aesthetic. Committed to the illusionary potential of painting, he extensively studied the topic of presentation and forced perspective. The three-point relationship between viewer, object, and backdrop recurs constantly throughout his entire practice, from his earliest paintings in school all the way through the end of his life, the syntactical logic of theater spaces making that most evident in these earliest works.

Moody but elusive in their actual narrative, Brown’s theater paintings recall the surreal vacancy of Magritte, while feeling in conversation with some of the semiotic and epistemological explorations of theater by continental philosophers of the day. As Brown’s practice would evolve, the most common nod back to this structure would be his iconic silhouettes: darkened figures framed in glowing yellow windows or moody cloud cover. Towards the end of his life, he became especially interested in bringing the metaphor into the third dimension, projecting shelves from the bottoms of his paintings so that sculptural objects could sit directly in front of paintings, explored most throughly in his series “Virtual Still Lifes.”

This interrogation of forced perspective relates to Brown’s larger interest in artificiality and the relationship between real and unreal. The transformative potential of illusion could be spiritually liberating or culturally destructive in Brown’s eyes, a precarious tension which required careful thought and reflection. In one particularly acerbic moment, Brown produced a painting in 1988 that characterized Disney’s EPCOT Center as “a funeral for real experience.”