Jerry Brock – aka “Brocko” – does not work the typical 9-to-5 job. Sometimes he is at his store at 4 a.m, and is there until midnight. This is the life of a self-employed airbrush artist, one of the few of his kind in the area, he said.
“I love my job,” he said, a point driven home by the more than 60-hour workweeks.
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Brock has always enjoyed art, he said. He saw an airbrush artist on the side of the road when he was in high school in Florida and was intrigued by the process.
He hasn’t put it down since; but this is not to imply that there weren’t bumps along the road.
“I wanted to smash the airbrush a few times with a hammer,” he said.
But his persistence has paid off. Brock taught himself how to use the airbrush when he could not find anyone who was willing to train him.
After running a store at Rhode Island Mall that made custom T-shirts, Brock opened his own store, AFD Custom Air Brush Studio in the historic Pontiac Mills on Knight Street in Warwick five years ago. The store will be moving to a yet-to-be-determined location at the end of October when the mills are closed to tenants.
Brock paints everything from cars to bikes to people with the motto “from lame … to insane.”
The detail of a project determines how long it will take, said Brock, noting that some creations may take just four days or as long as a month. The intricate design on one set of rims for a motorcycle took him more than 30 hours to complete, he said. A design for a disk for the back wheel of a bicycle took more than 20 hours from start to finish including the prep work, design and clear coat.
Most people have a thought in mind for a design, and Brock takes it from there.
“I take an idea, throw it in a blender, twist it up and pour it out,” he said.
Brock has had artists work for him before, but he does not currently have any employees in his business because, he said, art customization and design is a “very peculiar business with clients.” Everyone has individual tastes, he explains, and his repeat customers want him to do the work.
“If two people paint the same thing, there will be a different flavor,” he said.
Ninety percent of his work is done in-house, he said. He has already had between 300 and 400 customers this year.
Brock has a background in technical drafting that he said comes into play in the layout of most of his work. He is also experienced with graphic design work on a computer, making stickers, business cards and promotional posters.
He considers himself an artist who uses the airbrush as his main medium but uses paintbrushes and sculpting principles among others when necessary.
“I don’t see a boundary,” he said.
The majority of his advertising is word-of-mouth. He gives out his T-shirt designs as promotion and held a photo shoot of some of his work last year.
Brock is influenced by “everybody and everything,” he said. There “could be something insignificant at the time that could be a huge factor (on his art) later in life,” he said.
Often music, more than artists, encourage the feelings that he translates into his work, he said. A musician himself, Brock plays the bass guitar.
He listed HR Geiger, an airbrush artist renowned for his visual work in the film “Alien”; Ed Roth, aka Rat Fink, an artist famous for his grotesque caricatures; and Tony Mauro, known for his computer graphics on the “X-Files” as inspirations for his work.
He said it could be anything from “local graffiti to da Vinci” that could give him an idea.
“Anything I see, I can learn from,” he said.
