Smartly dressed middle-age men amble through a domestic interior that is just as outside as the star-filled sky above. Like the flaneur of Benjamin, they seem lost in thought. Where are they going? In dreams, spacetime is quirky. It doesn’t matter if somewhere or nowhere. It’s all the same. Dogs and cats and birds linger off screen (somewhere) and women and children. A mustachioed man stands up fron, returning our gaze—perhaps the dreamer. Start here, he says mysteriously. The painting evokes a whimsical feeling, as if everything were connected, including the beachball on the roof (or is that the ceiling?) and Mars in the night sky.
John Wilde, An American Interior (1942)