Benicia, California based artist Wayne Kohler  specializes in Photo Realism and Portrait styles of painting. A native of Salinas, California, Kohler gravitated towards art while attending high school in Vallejo by working on murals. Soon after, the Vietnam War intervened and he served in the Navy off the Vietnamese coast. During this period,  Wayne began painting as a way of dealing with the war.
     Following his discharge from the Navy, Wayne worked as an architectural draftsman for four years. In 1971, Wayne attended California State  University at Chico and began studying art formally for the first time. He became active in a group of artists who gravitated to Chico from the East Bay. Wayne  began working with mixed media focusing on metal sculpture and ceramics.
In 1987 Wayne immersed himself in his art,  painting daily in the French romantic style for the commercial market. As Wayne's work evolved, he began a  series of portrait work and landscapes, focusing on architectural details. From local sights in his adopted home of Benicia to European street  scenes, Wayne found art as a way of interpreting the world.
     Although Wayne's art has been inspired by renaissance artists, his influences and interests are far-ranging and eclectic. Wayne, assisted by his daughter, teaches severely handicapped adults new ways of communicating through art. Wayne's most notable commission was his accepted artwork design to decorate the hull of the America True sailing boat, a favored qualifier to represent the United States in the America's Cup 2000 Race, to  be held in Auckland, New Zealand. Wayne also exhibited in a one-man show of his work at the Sterling Winery of Rutherford, California in November of 1998.
     His work is represented in the Wieting collection, the California State Capital, Nobel Prize winner Jose Ramos Horta and the Department of Education building in Washington DC. His work has exhibited throughout the San Francisco Bay Area in Danville, Blackhawk, Sonoma, Benicia, Ruby Hill, Walnut Creek, Cordelia and nationally in Washington, Florida and the New York Art Expos of 1996-98.