Jenna Homen is Preserving the Art of Hand-Painted Signs
The LATTC-trained painter counts Courage Bagels, Little Fish, California Grill, and Bar Flores as clients.
Photographs by David Gurzhiev
Jenna Homen is clad in paint-splattered black Dickies and white vans, laser-focused on painting a script letter B onto a pastel yellow Mercedes Sprinter. The B is for bagels, as in Courage Bagels; Homen is branding the cherished shop’s new delivery van, which is parked in front of its owners’ Silver Lake home.
She’s using a small paint brush, black enamel paint, and a stencil to dial in Courage Bagels’ signature font—the same setup from when she painted their awning on Virgil Ave. Across the street from the shop, the excellent $2 pupusas at the Salvadoran restaurant California Grill are advertised by a plank to the left of its front door, also painted by Homen. And a block south, at Sqirl, her work can be spotted on the small metal signs outside of the breakfast and lunch institution.
Homen’s first gig as a sign painter was for Woon during the height of the pandemic. A Bay Area native, she had moved to Los Angeles in 2019 to enroll in Sign Graphics at Los Angeles Trade-Technical College, the only remaining sign painting program in the country, which has been in operation since 1924. She was midway through her education when COVID hit and classes closed. “I hadn’t done any jobs for real people, but we all thought we were dying. I was just like, ‘I’m gonna start DMing people and see if they need a sign,’” Homen recalls.
At the time, many restaurants kept odd hours and were servicing Angelenos for curbside takeout. Homen figured that signage could help ameliorate the chaos of it all. “I messaged every restaurant within five minutes of my apartment, and I got ignored by pretty much everyone. But Woon replied and was like, ‘yeah, we would love a window splash,’” she says.
Naturally, that led to more jobs: a paper sign for La Morra’s frozen pizzas, the hand-drawn wood plaque that hangs outside Bar Flores, words on textured stucco at Benny Boy Brewing, a Little Fish sandwich board back when it was a pop-up (and more recently, their logo on glass at the brand-new brick-and-mortar), gilded lettering for Bucatini. (Fun fact: for projects like the latter, she purchases sheets of gold leaf from Easy Leaf Products, a father-and-son-run warehouse in East Hollywood that supplies gilders, interior decorators, framers, and even edible varieties to chefs.)
As work picked up, it didn’t make sense for Homen to go back to school. Still, she says she was lucky to learn the craft from Doc Gurthrie, a legendary instructor known for turning graffiti artists into sign painters (in addition to his militant teaching style). Guthrie retired in 2021 and passed away a year later. It’s thanks to him and the LATTC, in part, that Los Angeles is riddled with hand-painted signs despite the prevalence of computer-generated signage in contemporary American cities.
L.A. is also a uniquely suitable city for sign painters to live and work. Before Guthrie moved to Los Angeles, he was living in northern California, where he ran a wood-carved sign business with his brother. As Homen recounts, they came to visit and “saw dollar signs” on account of how many signs existed here. “Everyone is in their car looking around, and there’s so much business turnover,” she says. The city's sprawl, traffic, and weather (i.e., time spent outside) all contribute to the outsized attention paid to signs. It’s the same reason why Los Angeles is the #1 city for billboard advertising in the United States.
Sign painters contribute meaningfully to our urban aesthetic, specifically to the exteriors of restaurants, bars, and auto body shops—all small businesses that are more likely to want a hand-painted sign than say, a chain store. But longevity is not a given when it comes to hand-painted signs. “There’s always enough work to go around because restaurants open and close so frequently, which is a blessing and a curse for a sign painter,” Homen says. “There is something strange about painting a sign for a restaurant, and then it closes and gets painted over,” she adds. When I ask her about dream businesses to collaborate with, she names Musso & Frank, Casa Vega, and Dan Tana’s—all restaurants that have been open for 60+ years.
As Homen continues to build her portfolio, she’s been hired by retail stores, coffee brands, and even acupuncture studios, but she always makes time for restaurants: “They’ll have the tightest budget sometimes, which makes sense, but I also think they understand the value in a hand-painted sign the most.”
So so cool