Roger Brown established his reputation in the 1970s with images of naive-seeming Chicago apartment buildings occupied by figure silhouettes and midwestern landscapes, their crops and clouds in obsessively ordered ranks. Chicago artists had discovered their own Henri Rousseau in Joseph Yoakum, whose flatly patterned landscapes they collected, promoted, and imitated. Their influence on Brown is obvious. Brown's distinctive brand of Chicago Imagism combines forceful patterning with a claustrophobic atmosphere and a psychologically disturbing manipulation of scale whether the subject is flora or fauna, clouds or buildings, cynical comments on current events, or a side show view of humankind in banners with texts. It's a Wonderful Lie, 1991, compares the customary vision of a happy life with reality across a zig-zag faultline. A sinister looking model-kit version of a stealth bomber has planted itself amid urban multiple unit dwellings and blends in with no problem in another 1991 painting, Stealth Building: Takes Off, Lands, Hides Anywhere.

One of the founding members of the Chicago School of Imagism, though not one of the Hairy Who six from the Art Institute of Chicago who hung their outrageously priced paintings on linoleum covered walls and created a comic book catalogue for their group exhibitions. Brown was, like them, a student at the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1960s and influenced by 1940s and 1950s comics and advertisements, by Magritte and de Chirico, and by naïve artists such as Chicago's Joseph Yoakum. Brown developed his signature style by the 1970s in rural and urban scenes that look as familiar as something on a billboard, but are strangely odd. His fastidious patternization was applied to paintings about current events and social culture (the world as side show) in the 1980s and early 1990s. Then, after moving to California, the painted the plantlife and scenery near his Santa Barbara home until his death in 1997.