An artist and art instructor, Wheelock’s teaching career began in Nebraska where he taught in a public school setting in Omaha and Fremont, at the Joslyn Art Museum and eventually opened a home studio to meet demand for art classes, all while producing his own commission work for clients. In order to focus on private instruction and his commission work, Wheelock and his family decided to move to Lee’s Summit last summer and opened Fount Atelier of Fine Art.
“Students meet here in my studio on a weekly basis and work through their own pace on this curriculum that I call the Core Program,” he says. “We’ve been doing it for a few months now, classes have continued to grow and students are seeing fantastic results.”
His Core Program curriculum is built around the 19th-century French academic method and is divided into eight modules. It’s sequential, so students start with basic skills, such as how to properly sharpen a pencil, and work their way up. Wheelock begins with an emphasis on execution.
“It’s all about how do we actually create something that’s made with a lot of skill because one turn off people have sometimes with contemporary art is they’ll look at it and they’ll say, ‘Well, my kid could do that,’” he says.
“We need to make sure that when we create something, we’re doing it with skill. So many teachers nowadays want to push the creativity part of it and the expression part of it. But 100, 150 years ago they actually pushed the skill building part first because it was their opinion that in order to really have no limits to what you could express and be creative with—you had to actually have the tools to do it first.”
While students enrolled in the Core Program meet weekly, either in-person or online, Font Atelier also offers workshops and drop-in sessions for those interested in less of a time commitment.
In addition to teaching, Wheelock does commission work for clients in the classical style. He acknowledges that portrait photography can capture a subject’s personality but something different is captured in a painted portrait.
“A properly executed portrait could literally last centuries—it’s something that could be passed down as a family heirloom,” he says. “So the uniqueness of it, and almost the timeless quality of it, is one of the things I love about doing commissioned work.”
No matter a student’s skill level, Wheelock believes three things are necessary to be a successful artist: a positive attitude, perseverance and being coachable.
“Growing up as the ‘art kid,’ I always loved to draw and paint stuff,” Wheelock says. “It never really seemed all that intimidating to me. But as I got into teaching, I really came to understand how... when I went into a math class, to me that was like, ‘Oh god, here we go,’ because math was not my strong suit—I’m very right-brained. But people are that way in an art class sometimes because it’s very uncomfortable, and no one wants to look bad. So it’s just very intimidating. What I always tell students when I talk to them is that you may look at this artwork and think, ‘I can never do that.’ But guaranteed — they could.”