Dalton Brown selects subjects such as houses and porches, barns, water and curtains for their evocative qualities regarding memory, the unconscious, identity and reality.Carey, Brainard. "Points of Light," Praxis Center for Aesthetics, September 6, 2018. Retrieved January 10, 2023. Her contrasting surfaces and textures and captured ephemeral phenomena (light, wind, water) play up these aspects, as well as various oppositions: home and outside world, open and closed, soft and hard, solid or reflected form, obscured and visible, movement and stasis, order and disorder.Diggory, Anne. "Layers of Clarity and Ambiguity," American Artist, October 2001, p. 40–47. She furthers these effects by omitting people and furniture from her scenes so that viewers can fully occupy the spaces; critics suggest that this pristine, vacant quality imbues the paintings with an almost surreal sense of mystery. Some writers have traced a chronological, physical and psychological trajectory in the evolution of Dalton Brown's work: from façade to porch to interior, then out windows and onto transcendent expanses of water.
