Richard M. Loving

Richard Loving, Water Connections, oil on canvas, 42" x 84", 1982. Richard Loving (1924–2021) was an American artist and educator, primarily based in Chicago, Illinois. He gained recognition in the 1980s as a member of the "Allusive Abstractionists," an informal group of Chicago painters, whose individual forms of organic abstraction embraced evocative imagery and metaphor, counter to the dominant minimalist mode. He is most known for paintings that critics describe as metaphysical and visionary, which move fluidly between abstraction and representation, personalized symbolism taking organic and geometric forms, and chaos and order. They are often characterized by bright patterns of dotted lines and dashes, enigmatic spatial fields, and an illuminated quality.

Loving's art has been exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York, Block Museum of Art, Hyde Park Art Center Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and Smart Museum of Art, among others.

Life and career Richard Maris Loving was born in Vienna, Austria in 1924. His parents, Pierre and Faith Loving, were American writers who lived in Europe and socialized in 1920s artistic circles. They lived in Hell's Kitchen in the late-1940s, where Frances introduced Loving to family friend Wally Cox, then a silversmith with a jewelry shop and an aspiring comedic actor. Loving learned the craft of enameling from Cox, which he supplemented by studying Limoges enamels at city museums; as Cox's entertainment career advanced, he turned over management of his shop to Loving. During that time, Loving exhibited at the Bloomington Art Association (1957) and Lawrence College (1963), and in the exhibition, "Enamels" (Museum of Contemporary Crafts, New York, 1959), developing what art historian Franz Schulze later called " a modest, static local reputation in craft circles."

Richard Loving, Hathor's Gate Falling Right, oil on canvas, 56" x 76", 1977. By the late 1960s, Loving had largely left the Brando farm, eventually divorcing Frances. and in a ten-year survey at the State of Illinois Art Gallery in 1990. He was also selected to exhibit in the traveling shows "Abstract, Symbol, Image" (Hyde Park Art Center, 1984), "Chicago: Some Other Traditions" (Madison Art Center, 1984)

In his later career, Loving had featured exhibitions at Printworks Gallery (1998, 2003), Jan Cicero Gallery, (2000), the Brauer Museum of Art (2010) and Hyde Park Art Center (2014),

Work and reception 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.

Collections and recognition Loving's work belongs to the public art collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois State Museum, Joslyn Art Museum, Smart Museum of Art In 1983, he was awarded a Senior Fellowship Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.