Sabra Field was born in Oklahoma in 1935, she grew up in New York, and attended Middlebury College, graduating in 1957. Influenced by her art teachers Joseph Ablow and Arthur K. D. Healy, she resolved to become an artist. After further study at Wesleyan College, where she made her first woodcut prints, she taught art at various prep schools in Connecticut. Although married and the mother of two young sons, she was committed to pursuing her career as an artist. In 1965 she acquired a derelict 19th-century tavern “waiting to fall down” in the White River Valley, which she eventually restored and converted to a permanent home and studio.
Among the most highly lauded artists in Vermont, Field was named “an Extraordinary Vermonter” by then Governor Madeleine Kunin in 1990 and a “Vermont Living Treasure” by the Shelburne Craft School a decade later. Commissioned by the United States Postal Service to design a commemorative stamp on the occasion of the Vermont Bicentennial, Field’s image sold more than 60 million copies and became a best-seller for the USPS as well as a marketing bonanza for the Vermont Travel Division. She has also designed imagery for calendars, credit cards, wine bottle labels, UNICEF cards, and hot air balloons. IBM, the Rockefeller Center at Dartmouth College, Billings Farm in Woodstock, Vermont Public Television, Vermont Life magazine, and the Darmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, as well as her alma mater, have all commissioned her designs. Relying on an iconography of green pastures, windrows lying in soft curves, an old red barn, blue hills, and a blue sky that goes on forever, her landscape designs conjure up a pastoral idyll that has enormous public appeal. As Graff writes, “If naming something is to own it, then Sabra Field owns Vermont’s color wheel. Her iconic images of Vermont’s vibrant landscape feature green fields, blue skies, white clouds, and purple mountain majesties.”
Since the 1960s Field has exhibited her art in galleries in New York and Woodstock, Vermont, and recently at the Edgewater Gallery, in Middlebury. She also has a viable commercial online presence. But one does not have to look too far to find Field’s art. Her prints can be found nearly everywhere in Vermont: in schools, banks, town halls, public buildings, police stations, libraries, hospitals, doctors’ offices, and homes—especially homes. This pleases Field. “Prints are for everybody,” she says.
Sabra Field was married to Barclay Johnson (1934-2018) for nine years (c.1961-1970) so many of her prints are signed Sabra Johnson.
Excerpts of this from Middlebury College Art Exhibition of Sabra Field’s works in 2017.
