The driving force behind the creative spirit of artist/musician Ruddha is a deeply-sincere vision, a heart-felt desire to help humankind awaken to its true spiritual nature.

This, he says, is the calling of every sentient being on Earth: the realization that we are here, in the physical realm, to rediscover our spiritual origins and, indeed, our Awakening to them.

“It is my mission,” he says, “to facilitate Spiritual Awakening by means of my art and music.”

By no means a conventional statement coming from an artist of this stature, but then, neither do his music and artworks exactly stem from the fold of orthodoxy.

Ruddha terms the genre of his art ‘Golden Age’, a genus rooted in the cumulative consciousness of humanity, unbound by culture or ethos and unaffected by the dictates of convention.

Venturing a comparison, his visual work is vaguely reminiscent of Salvador Dali while his musical compositions could, by a fair stretch of the imagination, bring to mind the likes of the Buddha Bar collections; Yello; Peter Gabriel; Pink Floyd; Grace Jones; Leftfield; Moby and Morcheeba. The main difference being that his work – both musical and visual – brings to the audience a very specific message, a message, Ruddha says, humanity is “only now becoming receptive to”.

What differentiates these works of Ruddha’s Golden Age from the equally cross-cultural and universal sounds and images of the New Age, he says, is the medium of inspiration, an influx into his sphere of creativity from the Universe about him. Bent on communicating these encounters with the higher realms, Ruddha bases his art on both his reaction to and interaction with this inspiration.

And so it was that, when he started his career as visual artist more than a decade ago, his then watercolours were meant merely as portrayals of his experiences during deep meditation.

He explains that his visual art is often inspired by his music and vice versa: When he receives the inspiration to write music, for instance, he often reacts to this inspiration with a work of visual art – “an extension, in this physical realm, of the process of inspiration,” he says. A Veritable interaction with the higher realm portrayed in the media of both art and music.