Victoria Lansford says:
When I was in college, one of my art history professors popped up a slide of the Lascaux cave paintings and said, “If you are an artist, the people, who painted these, are your ancestors.” That realization hit home and helped me understand why all of my life I have looked at certain works of art and felt a transcendent connection with the artists, who created them.

In prehistoric times, artists, shamans, and priests were one in the same. There were no questions of funding, of art for art’s sake, or of distinctions between genres and media. Art had a purpose, and it wasn’t merely to decorate people or walls. All art was the tangible result of an individual’s or tribe’s desire to commune with the divine.

My work is a means through which I maintain a dialog between my ever evolving self and whatever else is out there/in here. I no longer have much sense of a deity. There are days when some of my lingering beliefs seems foregone conclusions and days when they seem ludicrous, that right here, right now is all there is. Whatever my belief system du jour, I remain at heart a Jungian, and all creative endeavors are journeys into that great Collective Unconscious. I feel ideas and processes welling up into my consciousness and out through my hands.

Paul Salamone says:
I consider “God” to be everything that lies beyond the limits of our understanding at this time. I do not believe we’ve no chance of realizing this “beyond”, only that our current instruments for apprehending such are woefully crude. As such, when I generate a surprising idea or novel form in my art, I do not consider it be the boon of some infinite mystery, only a product of a certain frontier. Like all frontiers, it can be exploited and, eventually, inhabited.

The means of doing so is the real question for me: how can I consistently run across the novel and the intriguing in my day-to-day art practice? I believe that it comes through the process.

As a graphic designer, for instance, I am consistently faced with visual problems whose solutions must adhere to very strict limitations (whether it’s size, color, time, or budget). I never know what these solutions will be before the fact: it’s only through the trial-and-error of sketches and digital implementation — along with lots of feedback and revision — that I realize what was previously hidden.

The best of my work in other mediums adheres to a similar principle. In music, for instance, every song I’ve written starts with me improvising lyrics over a previously-created chord progression, wherein the emotional structure of the progression determines the “limits” of the lyrical content. In comedy, a series of standing free-form rants in the comfort of my apartment, combined with the incessant pressure to create a punchline, allows a good joke to come to pass.

In fact, one could even say that God — the unknown and the beyond — is revealed THROUGH the limitations of a project. It’s by virtue of our finite, constrained existence that we may realize the greater freedoms of the truly novel and creative, the act of art which takes the world by surprise. To put it geographically, we can only know the infinite expanse of the Pacific once we’ve run out of California.

Bill Harryman says:
It’s a kind of listening; the way cooing doves awaken the ear as the sun rises; quiet. I listen. Then, if I can conjure the right words, or maybe not even the right words as much as the only words that can say what has been heard, if I can do that magic, that conjuring, then I hear the next word, and the next, like God speaking to the man at the corner bus stop.

It’s like that, but not quite.

Maybe it’s more correct to say that writing is like prayer for those who do not pray. The act of writing is equivalent to hanging upside down — one leg tied to a tree limb, waiting for God to pray through me, to offer benediction to the world through me. If only I were worthy; so I hang, in surrender, waiting for the words.

It’s not like conjuring at all. Nor is it prayer. The words come as a fresh summer rain and cleanse my soul. Yes, it’s like that.

Thom Morgan says:
Until this point, unfortunately, not at all. Allow me to explain.

As I was growing up I was a member of Australia’s Uniting Church, a typical mainline protestant organization that lacked both the pomp of Anglo-Catholicism and the ferocious conviction of the Pentecostals. The church was then, and still is now, going through something of an identity crisis, due in no small part to the fact that they’re not really sure what God should be, and neither do I. Whilst a purely literal God would be too much of an affront, a purely literary God seems like too much of a stretch. Part brimstone, part divine revelation, part social justice: a God who nebulously wobbles across the universe, flashing in and out of focus.

As such, my biggest artistic inspiration from something loosely connected with God has come from eastern religions, a perhaps not uncommon undertaking for the recently protestant. It’s so much easier and more comfortable to throw around exotic names and concepts when they have no connection to some dull, plodding reality. Interestingly enough, having now lived in Japan for almost a year and a half, I have often observed the reverse effect in Japanese pop culture, wherein Christian iconography is kind of transformed into a pop shorthand for mystery and exoticism.

So I’m not really sure where I stand on the idea of God as a literary concept. For historical and other reasons, it still rankles. But it does give me the freedom now, having been outside of the church for quite some time, to reapproach the Bible with a definite purpose, where I might otherwise have been tempted to never re-examine my own culture ever again.

John Craig says:
That is easy to answer. It gave me a place to steal a whole bunch of ideas from, plus no copyright infringements to worry about. The only quandary I had was in breaking commandment number eight; thou shalt not steal, but is pilfering ideas from sacred text really stealing?

The book of Genesis and the book of Revelations from the King James Bible are single handily the two most influential works I have ever read, re-read, and contemplated some more. The importance of their teachings and morals were lost on me for the most part in my youth. These two books were akin to Star Wars and the Beatles for inspiration. I recognized how current cultures (movies, TV, music) were right out of these books. These books are the pillars of western composition.

The study of God is the study of the ancient and the future at the same time. The artist in me needs these works for purpose in what I am doing.