An artist with bipolar disorder reveals his artistic talent

By Isaac DeVille, staff reporter. 

Vincent van Gogh,  Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock. All of these are artists, but there is another thing tying them together:  mental disability.  This is where Dr. David A. Feingold comes in. This bipolar artist displayed his art on Monday, Nov 14 in room S-105 on Delta’s main campus.

If Feingold were to use three adjectives describing his artwork it would be “dark, dramatic, and expressive.”

According to him, these paintings are the proof of the bipolar disorder. Feingold says, “We have physical scars that show us there’s an illness, and we go by what it looks like.  But in bipolar disorder, the scars are unseen, so the art is the stitches and the scars of bipolar disorder.”

He is careful in how he identifies himself as an artist with bipolar disorder.  “We don’t say ‘I’m a bipolar artist.’  We say ‘I am an artist with bipolar disorder.’  However, I feel like the first way of saying it is more honest.”

Feingold knew he was talented even before he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.  He recalls when he was about three his mother used to encourage him to draw.  He would draw a circle for a face and a stick body.  His mother also gave him plain paper plates and he would paint faces on them and she would hang them up proudly.

His present art is 100% digital.  Each image takes a couple of days to a couple of weeks to form.  He realized he was bipolar about ten years ago and ever since then it has informed his art.