Influenced by early 20th-century primitive art and biomorphic abstraction, Brown's works have the naïve quality of a child's drawing. Best known in the 1980s for his semi-figurative paintings, which share similarities with Jean-Michel Basquiat and East Village painting of the time, Brown used ceramics, collage, and other media to produce works of cosmic quality. His work has taken on several styles over the years but retains a "handmade" look. It combines the concerns of the modernist tradition with the spiritual motifs and interests of tribal art. Much of his work is unrealistic but contains representations or signs of recognizable faces and objects that appear to hover and vibrate with ambiguous meaning, sometimes producing faint echoes of our planetary realm of art.