Le Bassin De Carenage
Boat in the port
Images from fineartamerica.com
Born 1955 in Morocco of French parents, Jean-Paul Courchia moved to the Provence region of France in 1964. Here he began his career as an artist with his first exhibition in 1981. In 1994, the prestigious Jouvene Gallery of Marseille started to represent his works. Jouvene has been associated with some of the finest French painters including Cezanne and Van Gogh. With the addition of Courchia they continue their support of the traditional Provençal landscape painting.
Courchia shares many common features with he best-known Provençal painters. These include a deliberate forcefulness and willful expression of emotional power. the exaggeration of volume, color and line are also manifest in Courchia’s process, often through distortion. His compositions are enhanced by superimposing broad strokes of color and light over scenes of everyday life. His canvases are serene reminders of the past. His simplification of objects into shapes and broad bans of color disguises a complexity of emotion. His dramatic use of shadows and reflections give motion and vitality to his works. The absence of figures does not imply a barren or abandoned landscape devoid of life. The colors and shapes themselves are the life of Courchia’s paintings and they are as striking and animated as any human figure, if not more so.
Gallery Revel, New York began their relationship with the artist in 1998, bringing the painting of Provence to the Americas. In June of 1999 and again in 2005, the National Arts Club in New York hosted a one-man show for Courchia. His work has great appeal, bringing the warm sunshine and leisurely life style of Provence alive on the canvas. Thematically his paintings concentrate on the subjects most associated with the region, i.e. the cafes, the hidden gardens, the harbor and the magnificent views. What typically attracts the viewer is the contrast between the simplicity of style and the complexity of emotion.
(mdhfinearts.com)
Entrée du port de Marseille avec voile par
Entrée du port de Marseille avec voile par
images from france.jeditoo.com
Jean-Paul Courchia is a highly successful painter both in Europe and in America. His oils on canvas were displayed in Marseille in the famous Provençal Gallery Jouvène, which Van Gogh and Cezanne called home for their artwork. Her Highness Queen Paola of Belgium, Madame Nobutaka Shinomiya, wife of the Consul of Japan in Marseille, and Mr. Aldon James, president of the National Arts Club in New-York, are avid collectors of his work.
Jean-Paul Courchia is also a unique speaker, able to explain through a simple approach the way we see art. He is a physician and a world renowned artist painter. He splits his life among his office, his studio and the department of ophthalmology where his two passions merge: he works on the relationship between art and the brain by analyzing eye’s movements.
(fineartamerica.com)
La Place de St. Remy
Chaises Longues Op La Place
Images from poemes-provence.fr
He is often requested to give lectures in France and in the United- States about the art visitors’ visual strategy, and art and science. If you think that you are free in front of a painting you are wrong. Once the artist “catches” you he makes you travel in his work of art. If he is clever and succeeds in his plan, he will show you elements that are at the base of his message. If you stay in front of the painting, you will connect with the brain of the painter when he created his work. Through the study of eye movement he can describe the most complicated inner workings of the brain in a way that no one could understand. There is another facet to his interesting persona: medical doctor of endocrinology and metabolic diseases, he is fascinated by science and has given about one hundred of lectures in both fields: endocrinology and vision in art.
Measurements of eye movements in the discovery of a painting show how vision is often disconnected from the brain. Starting out from a preliminary study on the behaviour of museum visitors, and in particular the average time spent in front of a picture (about 12 seconds!), his research is intended to highlight the information picked up by viewers exploring various paintings. You will be captivated by the videos showing the eye-gaze strategies in paintings by Henri Matisse and Francisco Goya.
In a new work presented at the French Society of Ophthalmology he explores the last painting of Van Gogh, and shows how the artistic information conducts the eye of the spectator. Through this painting, we discover the artist’s brain in his last moments. His study interested the documentation center of the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam. It is a unique chance to have in the same personality the two sides of these fields, artistic and scientific knowledge.
During his lecture, Doctor Courchia will bring you in his studio to explain how a painter, whether consciously or not, uses his abilities to catch the eye and makes it travel between the lines and the colours.
(fineartamerica.com)
The interplay of light and shadows is not by accident in the works Jean-Paul Courchia. And the basic constriction of many famous works of art is also not by accident. He is fascinated by science, art, medicine, perceptions, and light. He is working with the department of ophthalmology in Saint-Joseph’s hospital in Marseille and he is often requested to give lectures in France about the visual strategy of visitors in front of paintings. Measurements of eye movements in the discovery of a painting show how vision is often disconnected from the brain. One of his videos shows the eye gaze strategies in paintings by Henri Matisse and Francisco Goya. In a new work presented at the French Society of Ophthalmology in Paris in May 2007, he realizes the exploration of the last painting of Van Gogh, and shows how the artistic information conducts the eye of the spectator.
(westportrivergallery.com)