Born Joan Vivien Beatty and raised in San Francisco, Joan Brown studied with Elmer Bischoff and Frank Lobdell at the California School of Fine Arts (later the San Francisco Art Institute), where she received a BFA in 1959 and an MFA in 1960. Like other artists associated with the Bay Area Figurative movement, Brown reconciled recognizable subject matter with the gestural brushwork of Abstract Expressionism in her vibrant, lushly painted canvases. Acknowledging the deeply personal nature of her work, Brown stated, “There’s always a connection to the way I’m describing something, which is basically a[n] expressionistic belief. . . . No matter whether I’m painting, looser or tighter or neater or sloppier, it’s still there, and always will be. . . . I feel most of my work, if not all of it, maybe most, is like keeping a diary” (Karlstrom 1975, n.p.).

With its surreal overtones and passages of painterly, impastoed brushwork, Dogs Dreaming of Things and Images is emblematic of Brown’s artful bridging of abstraction and representation. This visually complex and large-scale, early-career work embodies the artist’s characteristic technique and humanist preoccupations, reflecting her focus on domestic subjects and an intensely personal vision, often imbued with subtle humor and existential or metaphysical ruminations. Frequently using dogs and other animals as human surrogates in her paintings, Brown blurred the distinctions between animals and their human counterparts, observing, “This kind of duality this kind of exchange of the animal nature and human nature, of the connection and psychic response that the animal picks up from the person, is something that continues to fascinate me” (Tsujimoto and Bass 1998, 33).