[1][2] 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.

[7][9][10][3] In 2010, critic James Yood wrote that Loving's work "mull[ed] over the possibilities of pattern and representation, of narrative and allegory" to attain a kind of wisdom, transcendence and acknowledgement of universals, "seeking understanding of self within the poetics of the physical world.

[21][43][44] They employ painterly gesture influenced by Abstract Expressionism and bright colors sometimes flecked with gold and silver;[21][29][45] 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.

[21][3] Loving's new direction was heralded in a 1969 Kovler Gallery show, in which he presented large shaped drawings of fantastical machine forms described as faintly evocative of the Cubist work of Francis Picabia.

[3][46][47] 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.

[35] Loving populated his canvasses with free-form, flat diagrammatic shapes (often with bold, electric outlines) and interior borders or portals, creating ambiguous, theatrical spaces that emphasized a contrast between diffuseness and definition (e.g., Water Connections, 1982).

[5][10][49] 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.

[1] After an early-1980s trip in which Loving encountered Byzantine mosaics and frescoes, he began incorporating discrete, personalized symbols alluding to sexuality (lips, flowers, fountains, seeds, fireworks) and elemental or microcosmic life (flames, molecules, water, crystals) in his work (e.g., Amorosa Tropicalia, 1983;[50] La Source, 1986; Catalysis, 1991; or Parabola, 1993).

[11][54][8][53] 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.

[11][54][8] 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.