Jean Labourdette is more popularly known as Turf One. Turf One is the guy who had a love affair with the streets of Paris and painted graffiti on it. When Turf realized that he needs to widen his horizon as an artist, Jean embarked a journey to becoming a multi-disciplinary artist, illustrator, comic artist and a film maker. 

"Turf is somewhat obsessed with Victorian-looking midgets sporting dandy facial hair, Russian icons, dead things of all sorts, carnival sideshows and seedy vermin-infested theater stages." describes his website. 

But we wanted to learn more about this Montreal based artist, and contacted him to spare some time for us and our readers. So here's an interesting interview where Turf talks about his thought provoking art, family, career and much more. 

My name is Jean Labourdette (aka Turf One), I am a painter and mixed media artist... I was born and grew up in Paris, and am currently based in Montreal...

My main artistic inspirations, in a nutshell, would be my father, Jacques Labourdette, who was an artist as well; Rembrandt ; Van Eyck in particular and the Flemish primitives in general ; Otto Dix...

The essence of my work is being able to tap into my unconscious mind as much as possible. I just let ideas surface from it whenever they decide to, and try to be receptive enough to capture them then. My paintings are in a way like dreams : images (mostly) generated by my unconscious...

I am really into portraits these days... I like to paint faces that tell stories through their imperfections, wrinkles, scars... I like to paint eyes to capture a little bit of the subject's soul...

I guess the primary challenge was to be able to paint without getting busted by the cops ! (laughs) Graffiti really challenged my creativity and also pushed me to constantly evolve on a technical level... For the first time, I had a public, people would actually see my work and judge it, so it motivated me to really push further all the time...

I started working doing comics and illustrations in Paris in 1996 for a french Hip-Hop magazine called Radikal... I worked with them until 2001, when I moved to Canada... At this point, I was getting tired of illustration and decided to put the focus back on my personal work, see where this would take me... I needed to say something different and more personal with my work, to reapropriate myself my creativity. I needed to get out of the illustrator's mentality, where you create images with the purpose of consciously conveying a specific message, so I started listening to what my subconscious had to say. This was the beginning of a whole new period in my work, way more meaningful and fulfilling on a personal level...

I guess my parents really encouraged creativity, when I was growing up. My dad was an artist so this was my natural environment. I always drew, as far as I can remember... My dad used to get me lots of wonderful children books, then comics, the inspirations of which are still noticeable in my work today... I always knew that drawing was my thing, my natural talent, god-given perhaps but also parents-given, for sure...

That is a hard question... I have a thing for "The Royal Arms", this is the first piece I did of a midget with a Victorian mustache...It was definitely one of the establishing pieces for all the work I've done those past few years... But other than that, I couldn t really tell you why.

Am I ?? Honestly, I don't really realize how "renowned" I am... Really ! It doesn't really affect my every day life... But I am definitely happy that my work can be seen by more people, because this is how it gets a "life" of its own... I create the painting, but it is only thanks to the viewer's eye that it becomes fully alive...

I am sure it is vital, as the internet is definitely our main source of information and our main medium of communication... I unfortunately don't take advantage of it to its full extent as I am so busy painting... My website hasn't even been updated yet with the works of the show I had at Jonathan LeVine gallery in December 2010, for example !!

Well, for what it's worth , there you go... :

- make sure you always speak your own personal voice, make sure that your work is the reflection of who you are and how you see the world, this is what makes it worthwhile...

- Never be fully satisfied with the way you paint, aim at making each piece better than the previous one in one way or another, this way you'll keep constantly evolving.

- If ever you realize that the visual language you once came up with is becoming dry, void, dead, empty, lost its meaning, make sure you don't stick to what then became an obsolete formula for safety's sake. Stop, take time off and reconnect with what's inside of you so that it translates into your work... This is the best thing I ever did for myself, (and I probably will have to do it again at some point in my life !) (laughs)

To learn more about Jean, visit his website 'Turfizm'.