[1] Her style displays the influence of a variety of contemporary painters, from Willem de Kooning, Francis Bacon[2] and Joan Mitchell, to Old Masters like Rubens, Poussin and Goya.

[5][6] Brown was born to novelist Shena Mackay and art critic David Sylvester[7] and raised in England.

She earned First Class Honours at the Slade and was the first-prize recipient in the National Competition for British Art Students.

[16] Brown now lives and works in New York City, and has had dozens of exhibitions in both the United States and in England since moving in 1994.

[13] Her particular style of painting is largely inspired by the New York Abstract Expressionists, namely  Francis Bacon and Willem de Kooning.

Brown often titles her paintings after classic Hollywood films and musicals, such as The Pyjama Game, The Bedtime Story and The Fugitive Kind.

[23] In 2013, Brown based a series of paintings on a photograph of a large group of nude women that appeared on the British release of a 1968 Jimi Hendrix album Electric Ladyland.

[20] The sexuality and eroticism of Brown's depictions of expressive figures and nudes are echoed in rich colours, luscious paint handling, and animated brushwork; her work combines representational and abstract elements.

However, self-conscious of her connection with artists such as Willem de Kooning and Lucian Freud, Brown often interjects fresh humor or irony by titling her paintings after famous musicals and films.

She has been grouped with leading female contemporary painters, including Charline von Heyl, Jacqueline Humphries, Laura Owens, Jutta Koether, Amy Sillman, and Emily Sundblad.

[27] In the February 2000 edition of Vanity Fair, Brown, along with fellow artists Inka Essenhigh, John Currin and others, appeared in photographs taken by Todd Eberle.

A photograph that appeared in The New Yorker made showed Brown from the back as she stood, cigarette in hand, studying one of her paintings.

[28] Brown presided in 2004, along with other artists such as Laura Owens and Elizabeth Peyton, over a Democratic Party fund-raising event, Art Works for Hard Money, in Los Angeles.

The painting sold for $250,000 in a virtual auction conducted in July by Christie's, which also included donated works from artists such as Eddie Martinez and Dana Schutz.

[30][31] Brown has received a lot of critical attention for powerful, athletically sized canvases and bold brushwork.

Likewise, in 2013, Leah Ollman wrote a review of a Gagosian Gallery show for The LA Times, in which she observed: "Instead of powerful and passionate, her voice comes across as detached.

"[32] Roberta Smith, in The New York Times, called a Gagosian exhibition it reviewed in 2000 "lackluster" and suggested that Brown's "career is ahead of her artistic development.