Tony Saunders
21 September 1961 – 11 July 2024
My friend Tony Saunders, artist, musician, and social worker, died in New York City earlier this summer. I wrote a note to be read at private memorial gathering :
Tony was my friend from the moment we met in sophomore year, to the tunes of Brian Eno’s Another green world and the Velvet Underground. If we had some similar high school background stuff, he was very much the City Mouse to my Country Mouse. He encouraged me to question myself, and Princeton, about how I was seeking to educate myself. This (and the music) were early, spontaneous gifts to me. If our paths crossed and diverged and crossed again, our friendship was constant, and regularly renewing. He was a brave person who looked at himself and chose sobriety, and his life was enriched by that choice. He kept making his art, in a variety of media, and on his terms, not following some temporary fashion. And he found a way to integrate his art into a later career as a social worker. He was very articulate about the playful presence of his approach. Not long after Tony died, MJ and I saw the Eno documentary, and both of us said, how much T would have appreciated that; but in truth he had already lived many of Eno’s insights into art and process. He was a great friend and we are lucky to know him and to remember him.
In 2016 Tony recorded a statement for his friend Michael Schickele that is worth looking for : https://matthewschickele.bandcamp.com/track/tony