Joan Brown (1938-1990) drew inspiration from her private life and her love of travel, swimming and animals to create a deeply autobiographical body of work. She earned her M.F.A. in 1960 from the California School of Fine Arts, later the San Francisco Art Institute. There, she studied with Bay Area Figurative painter Elmer Bischoff, a lifelong mentor, and met artist Manuel Neri, who became her artistic collaborator and husband (from 1962-66). Brown painted several of Neri’s plaster sculptures and frequently served as his model. Brown’s style changed dramatically during the 1960s. Moving away from the thickly applied oil paint and gestural brushwork of her early work, she adopted flatter surfaces, enamel paint and increasingly simplified figures and settings. This distinctive visual language allowed Brown to transform everyday experiences into psychologically charged narratives about identity, relationships and self-discovery. As she explained in a 1975 interview, “I feel art is the byproduct of … one’s life, of one’s ideas, of one’s feelings, of one’s follies and foolishness.”