Charles Wheeler played ball in high school, but since he was the smallest member on the team he was nicknamed Chico (meaning small boy in Spanish). He studied sociology in college but didn’t graduate. He joined the U.S. Army Infantry (1965-1967), from which he was honorably discharged. He began painting the following year. He “learned by association and observation of Livingston Roberts.” But he left Florida and traveled along the east coast all way to upstate New York were “painted indigenous landscapes” while following the crops. Wheeler stayed on the road for a number of years, returning to Florida in the late 1970s and did manual labor, including construction, around the state. Eventually he returned to Fort Pierce and resumed field work. Like others in the association, he returned to painting with the release of The Highwaymen: Florida’s African-American Landscape Painters in 2001.