Credit: Contributed
Credit: Contributed
Flohre has been fabricating and painting signs as the proprietor of Ink & Hammer for the past twelve years. His work is found locally at Tony & Pete’s, Square One Salon, Press Coffee Bar and Crafted & Cured, with more of his signs adorning the restaurants and shops of Cincinnati and Columbus.
Sign painting is embedded in the fabric of our every day culture. Remnants of 19th Century “ghost signs” — faded advertisements that have been left on the sides of buildings out of neglect or nostalgia — can also be spotted around downtown Dayton. Look to the weathered facades of the Requarth lumbar building or the Cannery Loft Apartments for examples. These signs, from long before the digital age, were created by everyday working people dedicated to their craft.
Born in East Dayton, Flohre moved to Vandalia as a child, where he was the self-described black sheep of his high school.
“I went down the path of graffiti and racing BMX bikes and the hardcore music scene. There was a new kid my sophomore year who transferred in and he had a black book, which is where you do all your graffiti sketches. It just fascinated me. That’s when I started drawing and getting into graffiti and painting.”
“My aunt was a fine artist who went to OSU and she would always push me. She’d gift me art supplies and I loved that. My mom was creative with crafts. She was always self-employed which is why I had this drive. I grew up with that around me.”
Credit: Contributed
Credit: Contributed
Flohre learned hand drafting and blueprinting in high school. The machining aspect of his work was picked up at a trade school in Pennsylvania where he learned automotive custom fabrication and painting, upholstery, and welding. He went on to learn print design and packaging at Sinclair through an Obama era re-training program.
“There are a lot of sign painters in my generation that came from the graffiti world. There was a resurgence from the sign painter movie around 2012.”
He pulled a DVD of “Sign Painters” off a shelf in his Davis-Linden studio. The 2012 documentary and book of the same name chronicled the history of the sign painting industry alongside interviews with contemporary sign painters.
Credit: Hannah Kasper
Credit: Hannah Kasper
“It was talking about the death of sign painting. The old sign painters who have continued to scratch by and stick with it are in the movie. A lot of people my age, the next wave, started because of this documentary.”
Flohre, 40, lives in an 1890s Victorian in Riverside that he is slowly renovating by hand.
TEA & TRADING
“I live just north of the intersection of all the rivers, over by Island MetroPark. I bought my house three years ago. Overall it was in good shape with fantastic structure, it just hadn’t been maintained for a long time. I’m trying to play catch-up on fixing all of the neglect. The original woodworking and details on the inside have not been touched. I’m updating it without losing the aesthetic.”
“Normally I’m up around 6:45 to 7:30. I’m trying to find a new routine without Mabel.”
Mabel was a Blue Heeler cattle dog who was Flohre’s beloved “left hand lady”. Her bowl still sits on the studio floor.
“My dog would have been ten in April. It was rough. She loved going hiking, loved being in the studio. She was a working dog, so she was always with me. I’m finally in a place of it not effecting me every day.”
“I make my tea, have a small breakfast. I started doing Stock Market option trading. I check my trading after the Market opens at 9:30. I’m in an academy and learning all that stuff. I usually have a class in the morning on Zoom.
“I get on the computer and start my work day, check emails. I use a project management program, so I’ll go through and see if there’s anything that needs to be done. I set my schedule for the next day — meetings, estimates, administrative stuff.”
ONE-STOP SHOP
“I come here to do the actual work. I like working with my hands and the producing. I turn the lights on, check the mail.”
Flohre started out in a space near the Croc Center doing woodworking, letterpress, and fixing motorcycles, but five years in he moved to his studio in the Davis-Linden Building. Different areas of the space are dedicated to tools, welding, painting and designing. The wood shop, mostly used for Flohre’s personal projects, contains lumbar from trees that he cut down and milled himself.
Credit: Contributed
Credit: Contributed
In addition to handpainting, Flohre also fabricates signs out of metal, glass, and wood. These signs appear at Modern Eye Dayton, Gem City Catfe, and Two Social.
“The majority of the signs that I put together and paint, I make from scratch. For the neon signs I design, fabricate, and weld the canister, and a neon shop in Cincinnati bends the tubing. I do the electrical and put everything together.
I have a couple sign jobs right now, mostly gold leaf work for restaurant windows. Locally I’m working on stuff for Square One, a long-time client of mine. I just finished up a big gold leaf transom over on 3rd Street. That’s the part above the front door.
I’m doing a sign for a car show and then hopefully doing a hanging neon photo backdrop for a bakery in Cincinnati.”
PLOT & POUNCE
“If I’m coming in to do patterns for a job, I’m using the plotter, and there’s a whole process of getting it set up.”
A plotter machine cuts and prints designs.
“I send the file from the computer to the plotter, which draws it, and then I pounce it.”
Pouncing is a technique used in sign painting to transfer an image from paper to another surface. Flohre uses an electro pounce on a metal-faced, grounded easel.
“The electro pounce wand is positive power. You put the paper on it and then it arcs out, burning holes in the paper. So then you get a pattern that is like this…”
He opened up a paper roll to reveal a design drawn out of tiny holes, a smiley face logo for a cafe in Covington.
“The pen draws on the plotter and then we pounce — that burns holes through and then you lay it on the sign. This was for a metal sign that I cut out, base painted, did the pattern, and then put on the sign and chalked. It goes through the holes and then that gives us the space, layout, and lettering on the sign itself to paint. This is the traditional way that signs have been made ever since Michelangelo did the Sistine Chapel.”
BILLHEADS & BONDS
“I’ve been doing a lot more design-based stuff, including a set of designs for Zero Two Wright.”
He rolled his chair over to his desk to pull up a file of mock-up logos he created for the athletic brand.
“Zero Two Wright is the number for the airport landing strip that’s dedicated to the Wright Brothers. The design is a nod back to the billheads of that era.”
Like other local artists of his generation, Flohre is intrigued by Dayton’s age of manufacturing and the Rust Belt sense of industrialism.
“The lettering style of the late 1800s and early 1900s is where my style has come from. It’s a lot of ephemera of billhead and letterhead plate styles of that era. I have a huge collection of papers and billheads.”
Flohre has drawers full of such ephemera - hole-punched railway bonds, an ad for the Davis Vertical Feed Sewing Machine originally produced at the Davis-Linden Building, calligraphed envelopes with local addresses from the early 20th century.
Credit: Hannah Kasper
Credit: Hannah Kasper
“I collect them online, at thrift stores, shops. I pull a lot of inspiration from these and the way the letters were structured on their logo. How they did their shadows and different design elements. I love the way the letters feel and talk to you and show themselves. It’s taken years of collecting and looking at this stuff, asking how did they do this, why is there spacing here, how are the letters formed.”
He pulled out an elaborately engraved bond from 1886.
“Somebody went through and laid this out by hand. All the lines were hand engraved to the plate, and printed from the plate. I take something from that era and then break it down, figure out how to do it with modern-day digital technology that still looks timeless for today and moving forward, which is a difficult thing to do.”
HIKE OR BIKE
“I’ll cut out of work by 6 or 6:30. I work myself to death if I don’t hold to that. When it’s not 2 degrees outside, I’ll go for a hike. I’ll do either Germantown or Twin Creek. Sometimes I’ll do The Narrows or Taylorsville.
Or I ride my bike at the bike yard over at UD. It’s a big bike park with ramps and a track. Or I go down to the trails and do the big dirt jumps, which is how I broke my leg last June. I was non-weight bearing for twelve weeks.
I’ll go home and try to make some sort of food. I’ll do a little house work. I’m reading Dune right now, I’m on book two. That’s been really fun.”
His day wraps up at 11 at the latest.
ON NEURODIVERGENCE
“It’s been a lot of years of therapy trying to understand (ADHD) and better know myself and how my brain works. Trying to work systems through to where they are beneficial for not getting overwhelmed.
When I’m doing the work, painting, I’m focused on that moment. It’s nice to kind of calm my brain. Everything outside of that doesn’t really matter at that moment.
Trying to manage all of it, the clients, deadlines, administrative stuff, emails, organizing it all — that is a big struggle. I try to do it in blocks instead of jumping all over the place.”
As for sign painting, Flohre said it’s taken a lot of dedication to refine the skill.
“It took a handful of years to find my style. That click of finding that space — I don’t know why or how, it just all kind of happened. I started to fall in love with it like I did when I started graffiti. Now I just keep refining that.”
MORE ONLINE
Find out more about Ink & Hammer at inkandhammer.com,on Instagram at instagram.com/inkandhammer, and on Pinterest at pinterest.com/inkandhammersigns.
Credit: Contributed
Credit: Contributed
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