When Ben Bishop, the goalie for the Tampa Bay Lightning, received his new mask last year, he had a thought. The mask had a splotch of glow-in-the-dark paint on it, about the size of a quarter. Bishop liked it. A lot. So he called David Gunnarsson, the NHL’s mask maestro, with a question.  “I asked if we could make the whole thing glow,” Bishop said. “That was the first one in the league like that.”  Painted masks have a long history in the NHL. Gerry Cheevers, who drew black stitches on his white fiberglass faceplate, is known as the first player to doctor his mask, in the 1960s. Ken Dryden’s mask looked like a bulls-eye with Montreal’s colors. Ed Belfour’s mask had an eagle; Curtis Joseph, nicknamed CuJo, wore a mask with a rabid dog inspired by the Stephen King novel of the same name.  In today’s NHL, pretty much every goalie has a custom mask, except the details, themes, and colors are wilder and more intricate than ever. That’s because of Gunnarsson, a 39-year-old self-taught artist who lives in Sweden. He estimates that he has painted masks for half the teams in the league (he has worked for goalies on all but three of this year’s playoff teams). Gunnarsson painted his first NHL mask 15 years ago for Johan Hedberg, a fellow Swede nicknamed Moose. He now hires helpers to sand and prep masks, which allows him to paint at least eight hours a day, he said.  “During my 20 years I have never, never had problems with my creativity or ideas,” he said. “It just comes like water.”  His output stuns fellow painters.  “He’s the lion of the group, we’re all just like the cubs,” said Paintzoo Studios’ Franny Drummond, a Pennsylvania-based painter whose zombie mask is worn by Flyers goalie Steve Mason (Drummond also paints motorcycle helmets). “People are going, ‘He can’t paint that many masks in a week, it’s impossible.’”  Gunnarsson’s masks start with a conversation, then a sketch, then a full-color drawing for goalies to review. He paints mostly with an airbrush—a paint gun connected to an air compressor—but sometimes relies more on a sketch pen, like he did for Buffalo Sabres goalie Robin Lehner, whose mask is a tribute to a Swedish death metal band.  Gunnarsson has one crucial painting companion: movies, mostly action and sci-fi flicks like “Independence Day,” “Ghostbusters,” “Back to the Future,” and “Jurassic Park.”  “I have some favorites that I have watched 20 or 30 times,” he said. Because of this, many of his masks have movie characters or scenes, like “The Shining” mask of Vancouver goaltender Richard Bachman (whose name is the same as a pen name used by King, the book’s author).  The glowing, circuit-like lines in Bishop’s Lightning mask were inspired by the movie “Tron,” a Gunnarsson favorite. For Fredrik Andersen of the Anaheim Ducks, Gunnarsson painted Lego figures, a nod to the most famous export from Andersen’s native Denmark. His Ghostbusters-themed mask was perfect for Cam Talbot when he played for the New York Rangers, but then Talbot was traded to the Edmonton Oilers and Gunnarsson had to tweak it. The mask now has a heavy dose of the ectoplasm ghost Slimer, except he’s orange to match Edmonton’s colors.  “Cam showed me pictures of Bill Murray signing the mask, also Dan Aykroyd, the whole team,” Gunnarsson said. “I almost fainted.”  Henrik Lundqvist’s current mask, named “Rangers Razors Unleashed,” includes the Statue of Liberty and sharp silver spikes seemingly cut from her crown. Gunnarsson has made dozens of masks for Lundqvist, including several for his MSG show The Mask, which auctioned off masks for charity.  “Lundqvist, he likes clean designs with strong contrasts and a lot of glitter,” Gunnarsson said. “He likes when it’s bling-bling.”  Goalie masks are not always symbolic of a goalie’s psyche. Take Dryden’s famous Canadiens mask with its pattern of blue, white and red circles, like a target. Dryden didn’t ask for a target, or intend for others to see the mask as a target. He wanted a mask with concentric Cs—for Canadiens—in the team’s colors. There was no deeper meaning.  “I heard from people later, saying that they felt kind of sorry for me that I was wearing a target,” Dryden said. “They assumed that was my expression of irony, ‘Well, if I am a target, then why wouldn’t I dress like one to make it that much clearer?’”  The goalie mask has changed goaltending in ways that early goalies could not have imagined. Dryden’s mask offered mediocre protection: A hard-hit puck, he said, would often smash the mask against his cheek and open up a gash. He perfected the stand-up style, with his head held above the crossbar so fewer pucks hit him in the face. Masks evolved. They now include cages, padding and custom fits. Stand-up goaltending is long gone, replaced by the superior butterfly techniques.  “You have a whole let less to shoot for because of the evolution that began with the perfect mask,” Dryden said. “You’ve got a feeling that this is really your mask, that it’s made for you. It’s part of your face.”  The goalie mask has no parallel in other sports, whose gear and helmets conform to team logos and color schemes. (College football teams sometimes have helmet stickers, which Dryden dismissed as a poor comparison. “They look extremely cluttered.”) But Bishop, the Lightning goalie, expects one sport will soon follow in the footsteps of hockey: baseball.  “I’m waiting for the day that MLB catchers will do it, because I have a feeling that they might,” he said.
The Man Behind the Masks of the NHL: How a Swedish artist raised the bar for creative design of goalie helmets