"From age 7 or 8, before going to bed, I would leave clean paper and pencil on top of our old Motorola B&W TV set, for my father to find when he came home from work, along with a note asking him to draw for me another picture of my favorite characters. After some time, I had a sizable collection of drawings of these animation heroes, created by my father, who would somehow find the energy to make these for me, after coming  home from a full day at work. My excitement knew no bounds when, in the morning, I would find a faithful pen or pencil reproduction of Mickey, or Popeye on top of the TV."

 

Soon he was reproducing these characters himself, crude at first, but he took his favorite hobby of drawing very seriously. By the time he entered 5th grade, he himself was becoming the recipient of requests by schoolmates to make for them, these same cartoon figures.

 

"I remember one kid sacrificed his milk money once and paid me a dime for one Popeye. In those days, that was about the extent of my earnings from drawing".

Around this time, about 10 years old, he received his first oil painting set at Christmas, and began enthusiastically testing the waters of this new media, marrying it with his also new-found love of bird-watching, and produced a series of small oil-on-canvas paintings of birds and other wildlife. He would hang these on the walls of his bedroom, and present some as gifts to his parents. His mother would hang these in different places of the house. 

 

As he grew older, his drawing began to take on more sophisticated themes, and by his final year of grade school, he had elevated his art to reproducing scenes from illustrations in his history books, of famous American and world events, often executed while sitting in class, during a teacher's lecture.

Initially he shied away from the formal art education classes offered in his school, preferring instead to hone his skills practicing on his own. At the age of 11 years old, his drawings of historical events caught the eye of one history teacher. She grabbed it off his desk, and marched him down to the resident art teacher to show him what this boy was doing while supposedly studying in her class. Both history and art teacher were suitably impressed, and conjointly insisted that he enroll immediately in this teacher's art class. From that time forward, the art teacher discovered that his new student was quick to pick up on all of the various exercises he taught, and was pleased with the production of his new pupil, to the point that he took one of his colored pastel drawings of two boxers in the ring, down to the principal's office, where he permanently displayed it on the wall there. 

 

By now Rudra was convinced that formal art training in the schools can be beneficial. So when he moved on to junior and senior high, art class was always one of his electives.  Having been hailed as a particularly bright student in his early years, being double-promoted in second grade, and winning the school-wide spelling bee a few years later, he was considered to be college-bound for certain. But during his formative years of 14 or 15, he picked up bad habits like smoking and drinking, and like so many young people of that era, developed a growing distaste for establishment values.  So although his senior year high school report card grade in art was an A+, he rejected any ideas of continuing his education in art or academics. And so after graduation, he chose to hit the work force in lieu of pursuing any form of higher learning. He accepted minimum-wage jobs like grocery stock-boy, and later, the oppressive grind of automotive factory labor. It was the mid-60s now, and in America the hippie craze was gripping its' youth. Their anti-establishment and rebellious attitudes toward authority now seemed attractive to the mind of this free-thinking artist. The neat clean look of grammar school was gone, the short-cropped hair gave way to waist-length locks,and taking mild drugs and consuming alcohol nightly, became his new regimen. His drawing and painting skills were now relegated to nothing more than an old forgotten childhood hobby. From the time of high school graduation in 1967 to his final year of working at the factory in 1975, the sum total of art he produced was one large drawing of The Beatles in magic-marker, on the bedroom ceiling of his rented apartment, and some political cartoons painted on the wall of the same apartment's bathroom. 

 

This rebellious period, coupled with working a monotonous factory job, spawned a growing dissatisfaction for all elements of his life, and he began to turn inward and reflect on issues like the depressing state of the world and his situation, and began to ponder the ultimate goal of life. He was searching for higher truths, and answers to deeper questions that his Catholic upbringing failed to provide.
 
In 1973 at the age of 23, he took whatever money he had, packed clothing, tools, and sleeping bag, onto a 10-speed bicycle, and embarked on a 2-month solo journey across the U.S., from Detroit to California, in hopes of finding some answers. During this adventure, he met many people, not all of whom could be considered good association, and the bad habits he had acquired in the factory became escalated. Moreover, instead of finding answers, it seemed that there were simply more unanswered questions. At his aunt and uncle's home in Sacramento, he accepted plane fare back to Detroit, packed up his bicycle in an airline box, and headed back to his roots in Michigan, more confused and depressed than ever. But his life would soon take a dramatic turn. 

 

About a year-and-a-half after returning, he decided that his existence as a factory worker would never be satisfying or complete. So he took his final paycheck, leaving one weeks' salary on the table, to pay for the walls of his apartment he had "defaced" with his artwork, and leaving electric guitar, stereo, and the majority of his material possessions in a large storage bin (which he would never return for) in the apartment's basement, loaded a backpack, and set out for the highway, leaving the Detroit suburbs to hitch-hike his way down to Florida, where he had no friends, no idea what to expect, and no plan for what he would do there. 

 

Thumbing rides, he arrived a few days later, and after living for a couple of weeks on the streets of Miami, he was met by a Hare Krishna devotee girl in Fort Lauderdale, who sold him a copy of Srila Prabhupada's Krsna Book, volume 1, and also gave him an invitation and address to the local Hare Krsna temple, at that time in the Coconut Grove district of Miami. Rudra, still with long hair and beard, was much intrigued by this strange book, with its' many colorful paintings of pastimes of The Supreme Lord and His associates. Unable to appreciate, or even understand the many stories, and amused by the various paintings within, thinking some of them to be pretty good, he decided to walk and hitch-hike to the address on the card. 

 

Visting a Hare Krishna temple for the first time ever was a totally new experience for him. He found himself drawn in by the warm friendliness of the resident devotees there, and was more than a little intrigued by the strange and unique new lifestyle, which included wonderful tasty meals of prasadam, vegetarian dishes offered to Lord Krsna. So on the first day of that first visit, he made a life-reversing decision to abandon his hippie bad habits, and take seriously to the path of bhakti-yoga, a brahmacari monk's life of devotional service to the Supreme Lord, the hero of all the Krsna Book stories. The temple president, Abi-Rama agreed to let him stay in the crowded brahmacari asrama, and asked him, "By the way, what do you do?" Not considering being a stock-boy or auto worker a significant part of his persona, Rudra proudly proclaimed, "I'm an artist!" Abi-Rama responded, "Oh, that's nice!" And not missing a beat, added, "So we have an opening here -----you can be our new pot-washer!"

 

And so it was that this young hippie embarked on his new-found life of devotion to Krsna, beginning with daily service in the potroom, and working his way up through other menial tasks, including finally, the coveted task of distributing his spiritual master Srila Prabhupada's spiritual knowledge, in the form of his books and magazines. Soon, he agreed to let the barbers' clippers claim the locks of waist-length hair he had sported for the last 6 years or so, and now the physical transformation from degenerate youth to aspiring servant of God, was under way. 

 

There wasn't much art service required at the Miami temple, so aside from designing a wooden sign with the name of the compound, "New Naimisaranya Forest" which would hang over the front gate, his artistic skills and practices remained on hold for a while longer. But aside from the physical change in appearance, there was a subtle transformation occuring as well. In all his years of decadence as a young hippie in Detroit, he had been practically inspiration-less as far as producing any kind of art. But now he began to feel a "re-kindling" of his ornate desire to create through the medium of pencil and oil paint. So a short time later, while engaged in distributing the Movement's magazines and collecting donations for the Gainesville farm in Alachua, Fla., he bought a canvas and some paints, and copying from the books, drew a picture of The Divine Couple, Radha-Krsna. He would come back to the farm with the small sankirtan party, and sneak off to a corner of the temple building, where he could keep a light burning without disturbing others, and began to paint in oils, his first spiritual picture.
Although his sankirtan distribution and collections suffered quite a lot due to the rest he needed to make up, in the van, his painting skills were beginning to manifest. His sankirtan companions, and the temple president were lenient and tolerated him, as they could see that he was serious about his art, and in the end, appreciated the beauty of his first oil painting for Krsna. 

 

Not long after this, the GBC representative, Balavanta prabhu, decided to send him back down to Miami, but this time, not as a pot-washer, but to work in the layout department of the Miami branch of the BBT, the publishing arm of the Hare Krsna Movement. It was now the early-eighties. Rudra was 30, and although not making paintings, he loved his work of doing (at that time, manual) layout for his spiritual master's books. He worked in the BBT layout department for several years, sometimes taking a break to visit another North American temple, like Cleveland and Detroit, his old hometown, to paint that temple's deities, or help with restoration of their museum. In the late-80s, he was invited to San Francisco by the late Bhaktisvarupa Damodar Swami. After repainting the deities there, his engagement shifted to Los Angeles, where he did some small art services, and helped with the restoration and repairs of exhibits in the F.A.T.E. Museum. In 1993 at age 43, feeling restless again, he decided to explore some of the possible art services for temples in Europe. So having only an e-mail conversation with the temple president in Radhadesh, Belgium, and no real fixed service set for him, he booked a one-way ticket to Amsterdam, Holland, and left the States for good. 

 

Getting a ride from Amsterdam, he met Radhadesh's temple president, Hrdaya-Caitanya prabhu, who graciously accepted Rudra as part of their community, and together with other leaders there in Belgium, hashed out a plan for Rudradeva to paint a series of large wall murals for the japa-chanting room, next to the temple room. Conditions were austere: working in the highest (and coldest) room of the old castle, he painted the large wooden panels for the murals, dressed in full winter clothes, and often wearing gloves on his hands. But the job became completed, and the room was now filled with oil-painted murals of Krishna and His associates' pastimes. This attracted the attention of Guru Caran das, president of Prabhupadadesh temple, near Venice, Italy, and in conjunction with the resident GBC, Matsya-Avatar prabhu, he invited Rudra to come to Italy to paint a mural for the temple's ceiling. It was decided that this would consist of 8 large panels, each depicting Srila Prabhupada in a different pastime, corresponding to one of the eight Gurvastaka verses.