Quote (KoJ @ 14 Sep 2021 12:25)
Behind the masks: Inside the studios of the artists who give goalies their game faces
TAMPA, FLORIDA - JULY 07: Goaltender Carey Price #31 of the Montreal Canadiens looks on during the second period of Game Five of the 2021 Stanley Cup Final against the Tampa Bay Lightning at Amalie Arena on July 07, 2021 in Tampa, Florida. (Photo by Dave Sandford/NHLI via Getty Images)
By Sean Shapiro Sep 11, 2021 37
Over the past couple of months, Brady Lambert had been predicting — and hoping for — this moment.
So, when Joey Daccord was named as one of the Seattle Kraken’s three goaltenders during the expansion draft in July, Lambert was elated. Not only because he was right, but because he had some work to do.
Lambert is an airbrush artist in Bakersfield, Calif., who has painted Daccord’s masks since the goalie played at Arizona State. When Daccord made his NHL debut in 2019, he was wearing the Arizona State mask Lambert had painted. When Daccord broke into the NHL last season, it was a dream come true for Lambert as he saw one of his NHL-specific creations in the top league in the world for the first time.
Now he’ll get to create one of the first masks in Kraken history.
“I’ve had Kraken ideas for a while now, and we’ve talked about that I have them, but not what they are specifically because we didn’t want to get ahead of ourselves,” Lambert said. “Now it looks like we get to actually tackle those ideas. I’m psyched about it.”
One thing, however, that won’t be on Daccord’s mask? Davy Jones.
“I thought it would be fun to (have) Davy Jones from the ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ movies, but it turns out Davy Jones scared Joey when he was a kid, so I guess we won’t be doing that,” Lambert said.
Lambert is a relative newcomer to the world of NHL goalie mask artists and one of the few in the industry who doesn’t paint goalie masks full time. A retired motorcycle racer, Lambert is a paint salesman by day and paints masks and racing helmets in the evening and on weekends. He’s the mask artist for Arizona State.
(Photo courtesy of Brady Lambert)
The other Kraken masks, those belonging to Philipp Grubauer and Chris Driedger, are likely to be painted by the most established name in goalie masks: Dave Gunnarson, better known as DaveArt. In a typical season, Gunnarson is responsible for the paint jobs of close to 60 percent of the NHL’s goalies.
Mask art has been an NHL fixture since the 1970s when Gerry Cheevers started painting stitches onto his mask to represent where he would have been hit with the puck.
Increasingly elaborate designs have offered fans a unique window into the personalities of goaltenders, perhaps the most mysterious athletes in pro sport. Masks give goalies an opportunity to express themselves, share their identities with fans and build their brands. Think of the instantly recognizable Eagle on Ed Belfour’s mask or snarling dog with Curtis Joseph.
Lambert and Gunnarson represent two extremes of the niche business of mask painting.
Over the course of five decades, as mask art has evolved, so has the industry, the people and the tools behind those creations.
Even in a normal offseason, without an expansion draft, the summer is the start of the busy season for mask artists.
Orders for goalies playing in Europe, where players typically report to camp in August, are already being filled. Many masks for NCAA Division I goalies, where orders are typically placed by the school in conjunction with the goalie, are either in the works or at least in the design stage.
Getting those projects done early is often a priority for mask artists because soon they’ll be expecting calls from their highest-profile clients as NHL goalies start to think about their look for the 2021-2—2 season.
Some goalies have already started discussing designs within days of winning the Stanley Cup. Andrei Vasilevskiy had already been sharing ideas with his mask artist Sylvie Marsolais. Other goalies, many without Vasilevskiy’s job security, were more tentative about putting paint to mask, with many waiting to see how the game of goaltender musical chairs plaeyed out in the offseason.
Andrei Vasilevskiy, wearing a Sylvie Marsolais-painted mask. (Eric Bolte / USA Today)
“A lot is going to happen, the goalies we talk to feel that it’s going to be a year with lots of movement,” Marsolais said in July. “So while I can start with Andrei right away, others want to make sure we are designing and painting for the team they’ll actually be playing on.”
Painting NHL goalies masks is one of the world’s smallest professions. During a typical season, all of the mask art in the NHL will be done by a group of roughly six artists, with a couple more hoping their paint job will make it to the NHL with their client in AHL getting a call-up at some point.
It’s a group of men and women working out of studios, garages, and even barns, in places such as Minnesota, Quebec, Ontario and Sweden. Most of the artists also work with amateur and junior goalies, with the real prize and billboard for your business being an NHL client, and particularly a successful one that can grab the attention of others in the tight-knit goalie community.
Grabbing a foothold as a mask artist isn’t easy, and there isn’t a defined path. Most already have prior airbrush experience, many painted motorcycles before painting goalie masks, while others picked up an airbrush because of a passion for hockey.
Marsolais was a goalie herself who saw a poster for airbrush lessons when she was in college in Quebec. It piqued her interest and after the lesson, she started practicing on wood paneling and other projects her friends would bring her. After gaining some confidence on those projects she painted her own mask, and then the other goalie on her team.
Word of mouth started to spread, and Marsolais started to pick up clients from the QMJHL and minor hockey in the area. Through goalie camps and clinics, she’d start to get more commissions. Eventually, it progressed from something she did on weekends to a full-time job, where Marolais currently is the artist of choice for seven NHL goalies, including Vasilevskiy and Dallas Stars netminder Anton Khudobin.
Overall, she has more than 40 clients ranging from NHL to minor hockey and has a studio in her backyard where she runs the business, Sylabrush, with her boyfriend Alexandre Mathys. Mathys is also a goalie himself, and he works on mask preparation and designs with Marsolais, who says a typical mask of professional quality takes about 30 hours of work.
Steve Nash has a similar turnaround time in his studio in Woodbridge, Ont., where he and his assistant, Stephanie Pasquariello, run Eyecandy Air.
Nash has been painting goalie masks for 20 years now. It started as a personal project, he painted his own mask, and then he started taking them to local rinks in the Toronto area where he made a couple of sales and eventually made the jump to the professional ranks when he was hired by Tim Thomas to do his masks.
The number of NHL goalies Nash has worked with has fluctuated in recent years. Currently, he’s the artist for Connor Hellebuyck and Martin Jones, while the majority of his clients are still amateurs in the Toronto area.
“I love working with the kids a lot. Like starting out with them when they’re like 9 years old, 8 years old. And then you see them grow up and then all of a sudden they’re off to college,” Nash said. “It’s pretty awesome and to see their masks and tastes change and like you can look back at the masks you’ve done for them over the years.”
Lambert has run his painting business since 2002 in Bakersfield, Calif., and was a season ticket holder for the Bakersfield Condors, then in the now-defunct West Coast Hockey League, who started painting masks for Kevin St. Pierre. St. Pierre became Lambert’s vehicle into the goalie painting world as he moved around the ECHL, and eventually got to know equipment managers, one of whom eventually became the equipment manager at Arizona State.
Gunnarsson originally thought he’d work with cartoons and animated movies, something he dabbled in before his mask business took off and he became the preeminent mask artist in the NHL.
During the 2020-21 season, roughly 60 percent of NHL goalies used masks from Gunnarsson, who is better known as DaveArt in the goalie community. Gunnarsson has a studio on his old family farm in Savsjo, Sweden, about four hours south of Stockholm.
The corner where he paints used to house pigs, the collection of masks ready and waiting for paint sit in an area in the barn where Gunnarsson’s grandfather would store hay for the cows. Much different product, but still a vital area for the family business from generation to generation.
Gunnarsson’s meteoric rise in the goalie world came with a mix of luck and talent. He’d already been painting goalie masks for Swedish goaltenders, and they were loyal clients, but the base of NHL goaltenders was small until the 2001 NHL playoffs when Johan Hedberg became a cult hero in Pittsburgh and guided the Penguins to the Eastern Conference finals.
Hedberg had been playing for the Manitoba Moose when he was traded to Pittsburgh, because of the quick turnaround of the trade, he wasn’t able to change his mask, which had a large moose on it and it quickly became Hedberg’s nickname with Penguins fans. While fans found a cheering or “Mooooose” ing mechanism with the mask, other goalies wanted to learn where Hedberg had gotten the paint job.
Kevin Weekes was playing with the Tampa Bay Lightning at the time and became the first North American NHL goalie to reach out to Gunnarsson about hiring him to do his mask.
It started what Gunnarsson calls a snowball effect as the number of clients started to grow incrementally each season, eventually to a point where he adopted his current-day policy of professional goalies only, and no longer take commissions from someone without a professional contract unless they can grab his attention with a design idea that really interests him.
It’s funny because the circumstances around Hedberg’s mask would have never happened with Gunnarsson’s current setup. Gunnarson prides himself on speed, he’s widely considered the fastest mask painter in the business, and has a reputation for quickly turning around the product, even within days of a goalie getting traded in-season.
Part of that is Gunnarsson’s setup; he only works on the intricate painting of a mask. The prep and post work is done by an employee, while he also has a stock of blank canvasses ready and waiting. According to Geargeek, 97 goalies that were on NHL rosters during the 2020-21 season used Bauer (61 goalies), CCM (18) or Vaughn (18) masks. All three companies provide Gunnarsson with masks to stock, so starting a new mask is simply a matter of walking across the barn.
This quick turnaround has made Gunnarsson a favorite of NHL equipment managers, who can often play the role of gatekeepers for artists working in the mask-painting industry.
According to mask artists interviewed for this story, roughly half of the league’s equipment managers have a preference when it comes to a mask painter. The teams pay for the paint job, just like they buy the rest of the goalie equipment, and unless the goalie has a strong preference for an artist, they can end up switching artists when they change teams.
For example, Jason Livery used to do most of the St. Louis Blues masks. But after the team changed their equipment manager, the Blues’ goalies have had their masks painted by Gunnarsson. Gunnarsson also works closely with Bauer and goalies that are between mask artists or changing teams, and use Bauer masks, are often urged to switch to Gunnarsson according to multiple NHL goalies contacted for this story.
Overall, the goalie art universe is both expanding and contracting at the same time.
Because of new technology and the ability to use vinyl wraps on helmets, having a custom helmet is more accessible than ever for amateur players and youth goalies. It’s also more affordable, with wraps costing anywhere from $250 to $400, pricey, but not nearly as pricey as the custom paint jobs which can typically range from $1,000 to $3,000 depending on how intricate the design is.
Some mask artists have adopted more youth-hockey-friendly pricing for simpler designs or fewer paint colors, but those commissions are still close to $700 per piece.
Some college teams also opt to use vinyl wraps instead of hiring a painter for their goalies; it’s a small number of schools, but the number has grown in recent years.
It’s a trend that makes the current group of mask artists more exclusive, it’s harder to break into the industry for a newer artist, while it also helps elevate Gunnarsson. For some younger NHL goalies, it’s now seen as a right of passage to be in a spot to get a DaveArt mask with that first pro contract, almost as a status symbol after using a wrapped mask in the past.
There’s also been an overall change in approach when it comes to painting masks, with most current goalies looking for more intricate and finer details on their masks. Many goalies also use multiple masks in the same season, leading to a seismic shift from the 1990s and 2000s where goalies went bigger and bolder with one element, and many used the mask as a brand.
The classic example of this is Ed Belfour’s eagle, which he had painted on each mask no matter which NHL team he played for. Todd Miska was the artist who designed and painted the eagle mask for Belfour.
“It was a brand thing, we created that eagle and the look and Eddie decided it was going to be his brand,” Miska said. “It was something that could be iconic, you knew it was him, and it also could sell on other things, like mini masks, and it held a strong recognition to Ed Belfour even without saying his name.”
Martin Brodeur used the same mask design for the majority of his career, while Curtis Joseph was known for his snarling dog that followed him to each NHL team. In the present day, Tuukka Rask and Jonathan Quick have had consistency with their masks throughout their careers, but overall masks have moved from simpler and iconic, to more unique and ever-changing.
For most of the current crop of mask artists, this is a welcome trend and allows for more of an artistic spin. Gunnarsson sees it as a chance to better tell the goalie’s story, while Marsolais looks at the finer details as the personal touch that allow the goalie to make it their own.
Others, like Nash, still pine for the older masks where a goalie had more of a set identity on their head, like the design he did for years with Jonathan Quick.
“I wish that era would come back,” Nash said. “But I know that’s not gonna happen.”
There’s also a practical reason for the attention to detail. In the 1990s and early 2000s, in order for a mask to draw attention, it had to pop from afar, the emergence of better television technology and the advent of social media has made it easier to share those intricate details to a wider audience.
When it comes to the goalies themselves, the artistic input ranges from ambivalence to fanatical.
Hellebuyck, Vasilevskiy and Carey Price were listed as some of the pickiest clients by their artists.
Connor Hellebuyck, wearing a Steve Nash-painted mask. (James Carey Lauder / USA Today)
Each season Hellebuyck will order four masks from Nash, two for typical regular-season games and two special event masks. The goalie also is adamant about having many of his off-ice interests represented on the mask, including his dogs and fishing, while he and Nash will trade sketches back and forth before coming to a final design to paint.
“I really wish on his designs, I could paint on a big flat surface,” Nash said. “Because they’re like a giant painting really, it’s like a storybook on his mask.”
It’s one of the reasons Hellebuyck works with Nash; he wanted to find an artist that had time for that back-and-forth on ideas and he intentionally worked with an artist that wasn’t as busy with other NHL clients.
Marsolais said that Vasilevskiy knows exactly what he wants on each mask, down to the minor details. There is some back and forth, but in general, a mask for Vasilevskiy is the one he described for the painting process. On the opposite spectrum Khudobin will just tell Marsolais to “do something cool,” and she’s the one who deserves credit for Dobby the House elf making an appearance on his recent masks.
Price is a Gunnarsson client and is particular about his designs before signing off on the paint job. While Price wasn’t selected by Seattle, his inclusion on the expansion list had at least started getting the wheels turning for Gunnarsson on what Price might have wanted on a Seattle mask.
“He knows exactly what he wants, so when I work with Carey I do a bunch of different sketches,” Gunnarsson said. “And he’ll sometimes choose things he likes from this sketch and that sketch, and then we start to actually build what the mask will look like together.”
While there won’t be a Seattle mask for Price, Gunnarson will be likely working on designs soon for Driedger and Grubauer. Those will be his second and third Kraken masks after the league hired him to do a team-based one for the NHL store and headquarters when the team logo was initially unveiled.
“I think we’ll have some fun with a new team,” Gunnarson said. “The goalies that play there will have a nice chance to be part of something brand new and historical.”
(Photo of Carey Price and his Dave Gunnarsson-painted mask: Dave Sandford / NHLI via Getty Images)