His artwork has brightened and, aesthetically, redefined the scenery in several communities in the region, most recently in Charleston; his “Way Out There” creation at the Charleston Coliseum and Convention Center was unveiled with effusive civic fanfare in November.
“I love this piece, because it not only depicts the vibrancy of the city of Charleston, but it also gives a nod to Appalachia and what we love about the Mountain State — our hills and valleys and that great landscape,” Charleston Mayor Amy Shuler Goodwin said at the reveal, as quoted in a Nov. 9, 2023, Charleston Gazette-Mail article.
When City of Charleston and Coliseum and Convention Center officials announced the grand-scale, outdoor project last summer, Wheeler submitted his credentials for consideration.
“I saw the RFP online; it was open to anybody,” he recalled. “They wanted it for the steps, what’s sort of the forgotten staircase at the Center since they don’t use it as much. They didn’t really have a solid direction for what they wanted.”
Wheeler attached a sketch of his ideas with his proposal, was accepted and completed “Way Out There” last September.
“The steps, in particular, were kind of interesting,” he said. “It was my first time using Polytab (a polyester woven fabric). Before, I’d always painted directly on the surface. I use exterior high-quality latex or acrylic paints. But the nature of the steps really called for Polytab.
“Lining up the image was extremely difficult, too, as well as painting directly on the steps, being down on your knees for hours and hours like that. But Polytab is used by mural artists all over the world. It’s super-durable. You prime it first with two coats of primer and glue it with a gel medium. It adheres kind of like wallpaper.”
In all, Wheeler said, the steps project encompassed 500 yards of “canvas” he placed, covering slightly more than 1,000 square feet.
That hasn’t been his largest spatial challenge, though. “Muralwise, I did a big one in Summersville. It’s all about outdoor activities like kayaking, rock climbing and rocks on the lake. It was over 2,000 square feet.
“I did a digital painting placed on a huge, vinyl banner for the City of Bluefield. It was originally supposed to be a hand-painted mural, but that went in a different direction and wound up being 1,000 square feet.”
Wheeler also bedecked the Gateway Center in Smithers with a 4-foot-by-8-foot, aluminum mural in September 2023. The mural depicts the area as the gateway to the New River Gorge. It contains an intricate variety of images that pay homage to Smithers’ heritage as well.
“Blake Wheeler is truly an inspired and inspiring muralist,” Smithers Mayor D. Anne Cavalier said. “His work in the front hallway of the Smithers Gateway Center is infused with artistic talent and more. He manages to capture the essence of our community: its past, its present and its future.
“The added bonus to his work is that he is a native West Virginian and local artist. Sometimes we West Virginians too quickly assume that if something is uniquely good and valued, it must have come from the outside our borders. Blake Wheeler’s work puts that falsehood to rest,” Cavalier said.
As for the time and “sweat equity” involved, Wheeler says it varies by project. “It really depends. The Smithers painting is 4-feet-by-8-feet, but it has a lot of detail in comparison to the steps project with larger shapes and flat colors.”
He makes time for projects, which can range from weeks to months, by working at home in technical sales, his “day job.” “I’ve been pretty lucky getting a lot of art projects the last couple of years, so both are kind of my income. After a day of work, I log off my computer and walk 10 feet downstairs to my garage studio, which is really convenient.”
An artist’s path — from Marvel to murals
“I took up drawing since I could basically hold a pencil and always stuck with it. I went to college at West Virginia State University to study art, but around junior high or high school, I discovered a love of painting, as well,” Wheeler said.
As the Lincoln County native honed his skills, he was more interested in creating Marvel Comics than murals as a possible profession, he confessed. (Funded by a Kickstarter account, Wheeler produced an independent graphic novel with a writer friend in 2012.)
While he also painted fine art pieces at the time, “Around the mid-2000s, I started to see a lot more pop culture art paintings hanging in galleries online and in magazines.”
In 2017, he was accepted into the Gallery 64 project, which added area artists’ creations onto the bridge pillars underneath I-64 in Charleston. “I sort of fell in love with this idea of doing public art on a super-large scale. When you see it in person, you almost feel like you’re in the painting. It’s like making art for the public that’s always there. You get so many more eyeballs on your stuff when you’re making public art,” he said in a Gazette-Mail article.
He has since painted two other I-64 pillars, as well as a pirate ship at Haddad Riverfront Park and some smaller pieces throughout the capital city.
“Blake has done several projects for us,” Charleston Office of Public Art Director Jeff Pierson said. “He’s done two Luna Park installations on the West Side and, in 2019, a robot installation on Bridge Road — and he did our first ArtBus. We’re not always the client, but in most of his projects, we’re the lead sponsor; he did the Charleston Convention and Visitors Bureau’s information booth and a bus stop in Kanawha City, as a couple of other examples.
“He can take an idea or concept and just blow you away with the way he composes it and uses color and design to strengthen his work.
“We try to use West Virginia artists when we can, and Blake is a great example of that. We have a lot of strong local artists we use in our art realm. Blake is one of the guys that if you bring him just about anything, he’ll just knock it out of the park. He came to us just out of college and our relationship with him has grown from there,” Pierson said.
Wheeler was invited into the Tamarack Foundation for the Arts’ Emerging Artist Fellowship program in 2022. “Overall, it was a pretty big honor. It gave me more exposure,” he said.
His Fellowship program-qualifying painting now hangs at the Mountaineer Montessori School in Kanawha City. “It’s a monochromatic blue painting of a little kid explorer in this vast landscape. It’s kind of surreal.”
If there’s a commonality to most of Wheeler’s pieces, it’s nature with a touch of surrealism.
“Many of my paintings in recent years have been inspired by West Virginia and its landscapes,” he said. “My wife, Leah, and I walk on trails in Fayetteville and look at landscapes, and I study other artists who do landscape work.
“Sometimes I go a little further and add an element that may be surreal. The steps at the Coliseum and Convention Center, for example — technically, it is a landscape, but each staircase is painted showing different times of the day; it plays with the idea of time passing, the color palettes that go with sundown and night, and having a central figure to give it scale.”
To view a gallery of Wheeler’s creations, go to instagram.com/bewheel or his website, artofblakewheeler.com.
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