Jean-Paul Courchia
Physician, Artist, Eye movement researcher.
Travel through famous artist’s paintings with Jean-Paul Courchia.
Jean-Paul Courchia is a unique speaker, able to explain in a simply approach the way we see art. Jean-Paul Courchia is a physician and an international artist painter. He shares his life between his office, his studio and the department of ophthalmology where his two passions merge: he works on the relation between art and brain analyzing the eye movement. 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 “catch” you he makes you travel in his work of art. If he is clever and if he succeeds in his will, he will show you elements that are the base of his message. If you stay in front of the painting, you will be in connection with the brain of the painter, when he realizes his work. Trough the study of eye movement, Jean-Paul Courchia can describe the most complicated inner workings of the brain in a way that anyone could understand.
Jean-Paul Courchia is a highly successful painter both in Europe and in the United States. His oils on canvas were displayed in Marseille in the famous Provencal Gallery Jouvène, which Van Gogh and Cezanne called home for their art work. 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.
There is another facet to his interesting persona, medical doctor of endocrinology and metabolic diseases he is fascinated by science; He gave about hundred lectures in both fields endocrinology and vision and 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 into 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 viewer exploring various paintings. You will be captivated by the videos showing the eye gaze strategies in paintings by Henri Matisse or Francisco Goya.
In a new work presented at the French Society of Ophthalmology he realizes the exploration of 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 highly 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, painting and scientific knowledge. During his lecture, Doctor Courchia will bring you in his studio to explain how a painter, with or without conscience, use his abilities to catch the visitor’s eye and make it travel between the lines and the colours.
