Making artwork to survive in a violent sport
Goalies’ headgear shows personalities
There is something wrong with firing a 100-mph slap shot at a piece of artwork strapped to another human’s head. Unless, of course, you play in the National Hockey League.
Goaltenders are a breed unto themselves, and so are the artists who paint the painstakingly detailed masks the goalies wear. More than 40 years after Boston Bruins trainer John Forristall drew stitches on Gerry Cheevers’ stark white mask, the painting of goalie masks has become a specialized, highly competitive industry.
More than a dozen painters based in North America and Europe serve NHL goaltenders, with dozens more handling minor league and amateur clients. Studios can be as state-of-theart as David Gunnarsson’s converted barn in Smaland, Sweden, with an exhibition hall and a lounge, or as unpretentious as the garage in the Montreal suburb of Ste.-Marthe-surle-Lac, where Sylvie Marsolais collaborates with her partner, Alexandre Mathys.
“Whether people admit it or not, my job is really to give the goalie an identity,” said Ray Bishop, a wellregarded mask painter based in suburban Detroit. “Go back to the Felix Potvins and the Ed Balfours. You knew them by the paint jobs.”
Many mask painters began as commercial artists, painting motorcycles, billboards or even guitars before gravitating to hockey.
Jason Livery needed a business he could pick up and move to follow his wife, Christy, a major in the Air Force. Bishop customized his Hot Wheels cars as a child with his mother’s nail polish. As an adult hockey fan, he turned to mask painting to escape a 9-to-5 desk job. Minnesota-based Todd Miska created artwork for movies, the largest a mural of Bob Dylan on the side of a barn for the film Crossing the Bridge.
Finding a good mask painter can be as easy as word-of-mouth, or, more appropriately, word of goal mouth. Goalies talk.
Gunnarsson’s work is so popular — more than half the league’s goalies use him — that Bauer, a leading manufacturer of hockey equipment, hired him as its official painter.
Henrik Lundqvist and Antti Raanta of the New York Rangers, Pekka Rinne of Nashville, Braden Holtby of Washington and Carey Price of Montreal all wear Gunnarsson masks, known for their cartoonlike features. Gunnarsson created glow-in-the-dark bolts for Ben Bishop when he played for the Tampa Bay Lightning, and the Statue-of-Liberty-over-scales design that Lundqvist wore this season.
“He’s so good at what he does,” said Lundqvist, a longtime Gunnarsson client who persuaded Raanta to try him. “He’s one of a kind.”
Gunnarsson, who calls himself a “paint nerd,” said he flies to North America several times a year to brainstorm with clients. His masks incorporate superheroes, logos and personal portraits.
“It is a very exciting way to tell a story,” Gunnarsson wrote in an email. “For me, it is not only painting, it is also storytelling.”
Other artists, like Livery, claim as few as two or three NHL clients. Livery designed the white mask with subtle elements that Jake Allen of St. Louis wore in the playoffs. Allen asked Livery to incorporate the Blues’ 50thyear blue-note logo into the design,
something not immediately noticeable on television.
“That’s just Jake’s style,” Livery said in a telephone interview from his shop in Niceville, Fla. “Jake’s more of a vintage, oldschool type personality. He doesn’t like to be flashy and crazy with his designs, nothing outlandish like some of these guys have, with so many things on the mask you can’t tell what’s going on.”
Usually the design process begins with an email from an NHL equipment manager. The painter and the goalie then exchange ideas, in person or via text or email. Livery adds a step, directing his clients first to Dennis Simone, a graphic designer in Staten Island.
Some goalies know exactly what they want. Todd Miska’s son Hunter, a goaltender who signed recently with the Arizona Coyotes, designed his own mask at Minnesota-Duluth, which Todd painted. Others, like Raanta, offer generalities and leave the creativity to the painter.
“I give him free hand,” Raanta said of Gunnarsson. “We can get it done in two or three emails. He will make a sketch and go from that.”
Raanta’s mask honored the Rangers’ 1994 Stanley Cup champions with likenesses of Mark Messier, Brian Leetch, Esa Tikkanen and Adam Graves, as well as broadcaster Sam Rosen.
Painters receive the shell of a mask, without padding or straps, which are added later. Once the mask is primed and a base coat applied — usually white — the painter draws the artwork with an airbrush, pinstripe brush or similar fine tool. The mask is finished with clear coat to protect it.
It can take several weeks for a popular painter to finish a mask, although some rush jobs can be turned around in 24 hours. Costs range from a few hundred dollars to $1,500 or more depending on the intricacy of the design.
How a mask looks on television can be critical. That, Livery said, can be problematic with some clients.
“A lot of the guys, they’re not artists,” he said. “They don’t understand what can be done, what can’t be done, what looks good and what doesn’t look good.”
Even the best-crafted paint job often cannot stand up to an onslaught of vulcanized rubber. Marsolais and Mathys, former goalies who met at a rink after opposing each other in a pickup game, said masks were susceptible to small chips, easily noticeable to sharp-eyed painters watching on TV. Also noticeable are the sloppy efforts to repair them by NHL equipment managers, with marker or cheap paint.
“We do a lot of research on what kind of primer to put, what kind of special clear coat,” Mathys said in a telephone interview. “They’re all for automobile, cars, trains. But they don’t receive 100 mile-an-hour shots. There’s nothing invented for that.”
Their research does not stop there. This season Marsolais and Mathys introduced masks for Boston’s Anton Khudobin and Tampa Bay’s Andrei Vasilevskiy that change color and design when squirted with water, thanks to a special white paint. They also made traditional masks for Craig Anderson and Mike Condon of the Ottawa Senators, who are playing in the Eastern Conference finals.
In the end, even the most lavishly detailed masks may succumb to the whims of goaltenders, who can be notoriously quirky and fickle.
Marc-Andre Fleury of Pittsburgh listed more than a dozen former teammates on the back of his mask as a tribute. He first used the mask for an outdoor game at Heinz Field in February, and later added Neal, for James Neal, in Sharpie to the list.
But in Game 3 of the Eastern Conference semifinals, Washington’s Matt Niskanen, a former Penguin called Nisky on Fleury’s mask, cross-checked Sidney Crosby, giving Crosby a concussion. For Game 4, Fleury covered Nisky with white tape.
Devan Dubnyk of the Minnesota Wild ordered a special green mask to pair with the team’s green third jerseys. It arrived several months into the season. But Dubnyk soon ditched it.
“The green one didn’t have a real good goals against average, so I figured I’d go back to the one mask, and the green one can hang on my wall,” he said. “Early retirement.”