Micrography masterpiece captures the legacy, leadership, and loyalty of Ryan McDonagh
Eleven thousand, six hundred.
It might take a while, but that’s how many words someone would find if they were to grab a magnifying glass and count each word that composes the portrait gifted to Tampa Bay Lightning defenseman Ryan McDonagh on Saturday to celebrate him playing 1,000 NHL games.
The portrait, created by artist Jayce Hall, was made using a technique called micrography in which words are written, scribbled and spaced in various sizes to create a larger image.
McDonagh’s piece began with spray paint on a blank canvas, followed by the repeated writing of words with different sizes of pens and markers to shape McDonagh lifting the Stanley Cup. The NHL veteran was gifted the canvas in a pregame ceremony on Saturday, one he described as “unbelievable”.
In order to create the McDonagh masterpiece, other Lightning players offered their descriptions of the defenseman who helped the organization win two Stanley Cups.
A closer look at the artwork reveals his teammates' main words: warrior, leader, mentor, dad, selfless and gamer. The piece also reveals key dates from his career, including when he was drafted, the date of his first NHL goal and when he won the Stanley Cup.
“I thought that was really cool,” Hall said, “that the whole piece is mostly made up of how the other people on his team see him as a man.
Hall is from Savannah, Georgia, and began drawing in early 2017. He took his craft professionally in 2020 and is preparing to open a studio and gallery.
His art began with charcoal drawings, where an artist draws a full canvas black and then erases to create highlights and images. It was a messy platform, so he switched to pen and ink, where he would scribble one continuous line in a “chaotic” drawing of animals and other images.
He missed the fine-tuned detail in his art and then opted for pointillism, where an entire drawing is made of “a gazillion” dots. Those pieces took hundreds of hours, so Hall searched for a more efficient way of sharing his art.
That’s when he decided to combine his previous styles into micrography.
“When I mostly saw it, it was more like caricature-like drawings, which I thought were really cool, but I came from a background of wanting to do fairly realistic stuff. So, I asked the question, ‘Is it possible to make something fully realistic out of words?’
“From February of 2020 through now, it’s been my entire focus.”
Since then, Hall has crafted 220 different micrography pieces and worked with the Lightning, the NFL, numerous professional musicians and other organizations.
The McDonagh piece holds more than 11,000 words and took 23 hours to create.
Hall grew up in Fargo, North Dakota and followed the University of North Dakota’s hockey team over the years. Hall admitted he isn’t a diehard hockey fan, but did call it “such a fun sport. 10 out-of-10” before adding he tunes in for the Stanley Cup playoffs each season.
He knew of McDonagh before the project and called it an honor to craft his 1,000th game artwork.
“I know some hockey stuff, and he is a name I knew beforehand. I’ve just been amped to put this together."
Hall couldn’t attend Saturday’s reveal for McDonagh but said he hopes to visit AMALIE Arena in the future. He hopes the McDonagh art piques a viewer’s interest from distance before they get closer and learn there is further meaning to the words within.
“My goal with that texture is to try to draw people to come closer to see all the details that are in the work. Then all the letters and the shapes start to take shape, and you can appreciate more and more the amount of time and effort that went into it,” Hall said. “Every single piece in the drawing, I intentionally had to do this. It’s not a splatter of whatever. Everything is a painstaking detail, a layer of intentionality.”
The closer a person gets to the McDonagh piece, the more they might appreciate the respect the player has earned over 1,000 NHL games.
“Having all of those descriptors in there and knowing that these awesome things to be described as is what his team thinks of him, I think that’s a really cool thing.”
