David Mikell - A Man In The Concrete Wilderness

Listen, real poetry doesn't say anything;
It just ticks off the possibilities.
Opens all doors.
You can walk through anyone that suits you.

- Jim Morrison

"I listened as the air escaped from the front tire and saw I wasn't far from the Bay Bridge..."

And so it goes, our own everyday battle with the cities of the universe to be the men and women we want to be, only to watch and listen as the air escapes from the front tire.

And we are alone, stranded in the concrete wilderness. Dwarfed by gigantic steel structures like the Bay Bridge, on which our daily travel and travail is dependent. Structures and institutions so large in scale as to compress the mind and squash our souls into dust.

And still we struggle to make the most of it - of the day, the year, our lives.

David Mikell is an artist living near Golden Gate park in San Francisco. His brilliant, colorful, alive paintings open up the doors of thought and feeling, as Morrison says, to "tick off the possibilities." And then my mind wanders through each one.

Here is a man who, when he is at his best, paints without fear.

Reminds me of Henry Miller's writing. Miller said, "There is nothing strange about fear: no matter in what guise it presents itself it is something with which we are all so familiar that when a man appears who is without it we are at once enslaved by him."

Here are some more of David's paintings.

Leave me a comment for his contact info.