Notes From The City: An Abundant Life

Eric Sanchez has a mind that works in amazing ways. He's always making connections, and always thinking, and when he gets an idea he'll keep thinking about it until he can make it become a reality. I admire minds like that. He's a programmer and a web developer and he's also an artist. He's a film editor and a film maker and a musician, and he understands something very important - how to communicate with other artists, how to listen and draw them into a conversation that helps him understand how best they can work together. It's not often that you find someone who has a mathematician's sensibility and a technical engineer's brain combined into the soul and vision of an artist, and when I met Eric I knew I'd met someone very special.

I had wanted to write about him in my blog, but the first time I asked him he very modestly said that he didn't feel like he had enough of a story of his own, so I suggested that I introduce him to the artist John Fathom, the Art Director of 660 Studios, to see if they could work on some website updates together, and as they worked on that project I could write about Eric and his role in it. He went over to meet with John, and over the months since they met he has been giving suggestions and showing ideas to help create a stronger online presence for John and the work that he and the other artists he is involved with do at 660 Studios. It's an ongoing collaboration because Eric is careful not to push his ideas on anyone. He listens and makes suggestions, shows some mock-ups and lets people decide for themselves what they want. I know how rare that is because I've worked with other web designers before. Very often they have their own vision of how things should be, and because they have the skills to do what needs to be done, people sometimes end up with a product that while it may be well done may not represent who they are or the way they'd like to be seen. But Eric is very kind and patient, and he doesn't condescend or assume that the people he's working with don't know anything about what it is that he does. His wife, the artist Dana Gambale, says he's the nicest person she knows, and I have to say that after seeing him working in several different environments I agree.

A few weeks ago I heard from another artist who I know who needed help with upgrading and updating his website. He asked me if I knew of anyone and I sent a quick message to Eric to see if he might be available. After a long day at his office, he made the time to meet with me and the Artist Robert Streicher, and as I took some photographs of Robert for an upcoming blog post, I took some photographs of their time together also because once again I started to see a very special kind of rare communication happening.

Last week when Eric and his wife Dana and I were at an event at a Hoboken store and gallery, I introduced them to the artist Stephen Cimini who I wrote about a few weeks ago. As we talked about Stephen's work and Eric and Dana looked at a few images online, the conversation turned to the idea of a possibility of Eric creating a computer program that could create repetitions of Stephen's work within one photo frame. Stephen creates pieces that are geometric abstractions, meticulously crafted and based in a visionary imagery of patterns he envisions in the architecture and design worlds. Eric had been intrigued by the possibility of creating new patterns by using the repetition of the existing patterns, and the next night, after having that conversation, I heard from Eric that he had been thinking about how to create that program, and he sent me a basic version to see what I thought. I thought it was brilliant and sent it to Stephen who loved it too. I told Eric that I thought it was crazy cool because crazy is a term I use to mean anything that I find astonishingly amazing. I've included the link here with a screen shot of a few of the possible images so you can see it for yourself. I then asked Eric once again if I could write about him because anyone who thinks like that and takes the time for fun to create something so intricate and amazing is someone I want the world to know about. It's minds like the mind of Eric Sanchez that can make the world a much more interesting and very enjoyable place, and when you combine that with his kindness, patience and ability to connect with others you have the beginnings of a beautiful revolution.

Eric Sanchez

With Artist John Fathom

At 660 Studios

660 Grand Street

Jersey City, New Jersey