Sabra Field, Going Home

Sabra Field, Going Home, 1980

Sabra Field (b.1935) is a contemporary American artist who lives and works in Vermont.  Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, she grew up in New York.  Field attended Middlebury College and gained an understanding of art there.  She decided to become an artist while at school, but considers her professional career to have begun in 1967 when she moved to a small village in Vermont.  Many of her works reflect this setting, often interpretations of the Vermont scenery.  She also makes prints depicting interior scenes and other environments, and even an illustration of the myth of Demeter and Persephone.  She continues to work, producing new prints and images.  Going Home is a particularly beautiful piece, an image that is both haunting and warm.  Field has commented that this work is not a depiction of a particular place, but rather the process of going home, as it exists for each individual.  Field's use of light and space is quite powerful.  The sky glows and the gradient from blue to orange is well done, but it is also mirrored in the rendering of the mountains.  They are in silhouette, but the way the mountain lightens toward the ground suggests an inner glow, as well as the possibility that a town lies just out of sight, waiting for us to travel this curving road.  Field also includes the subtlest promise of a rest house along the way, visible only due to the lighted windows.  Finally, the road itself is a pale beacon within the dark woods.  The entire print is composed so that the concept of home is represented by light and warmth, waiting below our feet, on the side of the road, or just out of view, but present nonetheless.