In
Arts Magazine, critic Mary Mathews Gedo characterized Loving as a "virtually self-taught … maverick artist" and late bloomer, who worked representationally during
Abstract Expressionism's heyday, retreated from the Manhattan zeitgeist to the country to explore the
medieval art of
enameling, and in Chicago, turned to abstraction at the height of city's
Imagism movement, reaching his mature style and height of productivity and recognition in his upper fifties. They employ painterly gesture influenced by Abstract Expressionism and bright colors sometimes flecked with gold and silver; the work differs from traditional enameling in its
modernist resistance to the medium's inherent decorativeness, achieved through the incorporation of disparate materials such as rough wood, multi-panel formats and large scale. They were united by their mutual interest in a form of organic abstraction that—counter to minimalist hard-edged abstraction—embraced real-world referentiality, evocative imagery, metaphor, subjectivity and old master techniques, while exploring contemporary stylistic problems. Loving's paintings of this era employed bright patterns of varied, restless line—rippling strokes, dotted lines and dashes he described as "obsessional mark-making" Critic Alan Artner has related this work to
Georges Seurat's, in terms of its technique and illusion of inner light, while also suggesting that it anticipated the
Pattern and Decoration movement and later trends in abstraction evoking aerial, map-like associations.
La Source, 1986;
Catalysis, 1991; or
Parabola, 1993). Initially, these works employed spare, simplified forms such as light fountains and comets (e.g.,
Sympathetic Outpouring, 2002), painted with his characteristic dashes and sometimes bracketed by otherworldly vertical blazes of light on the sides of the pictures. Paintings such as
In a Budding Grove (2008) or
Fall and Flowers (2009) combine familiar natural settings with formal devices such as unnatural curtain-like bands of light and glowing, curved horizon lines that seem to enclose the landscapes. James Yood compared them to late medieval
altarpieces, whose nuance and iconography suggested "both the physical and metaphysical, the prospect of a dense zone of nature gone wild and also an immersion into the forces—spiritual, chlorophyllic, reproductive, etc.—that in their aggregate comprise the dictates of life." ==Other professional activities==