Vermont Artist Creates A State Of Perfection -- Sabra Field's Prints Considered A Treasure At Home

EAST BARNARD, Vt. - Sabra Field, Vermont's best-known artist, isn't easy to find. Her house is situated amid a five-mile maze of dirt roads, with forks. Good luck choosing the right ones.

Her art, on the other hand, is a different story. It's everywhere, as easy to find as a can of pure maple syrup. In fact, it's right on the can. It's also on postage stamps, soap labels, phone books and bank cards - even a hot-air balloon.

"I think that prints should be for everybody," says the printmaker, 59, who carves her impressions into wood, layers them with rich color, and presses them between steel rollers onto the page.

That's putting it simply, of course. Wood-block printmaking is a long and elaborate process that demands many skills - painting, carving, color-mixing, patience, precision and strength. A single print may require more than a dozen colors on a half-dozen hand-carved blocks. All must fit together just so, like a puzzle.

Unlike paintings, prints are done in multiples, making them art for the masses. Depending on their size and number, Field's prints sell for as little as $35 and as much as $3,500.

"In the past, prints were collectibles for people who went on pilgrimages to shrines," Field says. "They were mementos. They weren't thought of as wall art at all."

Vermonters do hang her prints on the wall. They also hang them in cow barns and day-care centers, general stores and hunting camps. Field's designs have graced wine labels, state reports, kites.

Seated at his desk in Washington, D.C., Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., looks directly at a Sabra Field print. "I can't imagine living in a home without them," says Leahy, whose collection numbers 15.

Closer to home, when Buzz Audsley marked 20 years with the road crew in Barnard, town fathers thanked him for all that snowplowing and ditch-digging with his very own Sabra Field print.

For then-Gov. Madeleine Kunin, who wanted a holiday card with distinctive Vermont flavor, Field created a night scene of the state Capitol in a snowstorm, the lights glowing and the front door ajar.

For a 29-cent U.S. postage stamp marking Vermont's Bicentennial, she made a print of an empty red barn surrounded by rows of mown hay. The stamp, portraying a state of 500,000 people, sold more than 60 million copies.

Some artists despise the idea of making and selling multiple, identical images. Not Sabra Field. She still fumes when she recalls the art-magazine editor who told her never to sign her commercial art. "He said it devalues your fine art. It made me really mad. Everything I do is the best I can do."

She's delighted that her work will appear on Vermont Telephone trucks, phone books and - best of all - pay phones.

Field is so famous in Vermont that few Vermonters realize how unknown she is elsewhere.

She's content with her local celebrity. Though she's shown her work throughout the United States, "I stopped doing it. It's not worth schlepping a show to Oshkosh, Wis. Rather than hauling my act around the country, I stay put."

It's fitting that one must come up here to acquire her prints. Otherwise, it's too easy to overlook certain relevant facts: That snow loses its charm after six months, or that Vermont has a fifth season that makes winter seem like child's play. It's called mud.

There's no mud season in Field's version of Vermont. There's no poverty, either. No fast-food joints encroach on the cornfields, no tour buses clog the quaint streets.

Instead, black-and-white cows pose on green hillsides. Autumn leaves float gently downstream. Golden lights warm the mountains at twilight.

"She has a knack for seeing archetypes in the landscape," says Tom Slayton, author of a 1993 book, "Sabra Field: The Art of Place." He is also editor of Vermont Life, a state promotional magazine sometimes criticized for similar sins of omission.

"Sabra's art is an art of ideals, like Vermont Life," Slayton says. "We sketch the ideal, there's no question. But I think there's a place for sketching ideals. Without them, people might not know a farm landscape is a wonderful thing."