As a kid, Quinton Bermiller was always drawing, painting, and creating. Fortunately, he never outgrew it. Quinton’s early passion for art was fueled by an assortment of nurturing adults -- a pediatrician, a first grade teacher and his grandmother. His early work hung in a gallery in his pediatrician’s office. His first grade teacher was so enamored of his work that when he ran into her more than twenty years later, she still had one of his first watercolors. And his grandmother taught him how to see.

Quinton’s art is currently being nurtured at CGU by prominent people in the art world such as David Amico, Gary Lang and John Millei. “If you’re up on contemporary art, you know that L.A. has a lot of the top artists working today. A lot of the best people are teaching in L.A.” Quinton considered Cal Arts, Art Center, and USC, but kept seeing artists whose work he really liked coming out of Claremont.

“Being able to learn from someone like David Pagel who’s an art critic for the L.A. Times is a great opportunity. Here, you have your own studio and you get to know other artists’ work pretty well. Those relationships are very important. Many opportunities come up through the people you get to know here.”

“The work can be totally abstract and I can focus my energy on putting lines here, or color there, or a shape here, and all those kinds of technical, formal things, but what ends up happening is, like a little microcosm of the world, it ends up telling a story. This is a way for me to enjoy all the things that I like and still have it connect to something more universal than just the painting.”

“This is a community. When I had my first studio meeting with David Amico, he told me that when you have your first MFA exhibition here, your work has to be good enough to show anywhere in the world. It’s a very ‘real’ environment, not stuffy or pretentious. They treat you, not as an aspiring artist, but like you’re already ‘there’.”