File:Richard Loving In a Budding Grove 2008.jpg

Painting by Richard Loving, In a Budding Grove (oil on canvas, 50" x 62", 2008). The painting illustrates a mature stage and body of work in Richard Loving's career in the 2000s when he increasingly incorporated representational imagery such as brilliantly colored floral and landscapes into his previously largely abstract. These paintings 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. Critics have compared them to late medieval altarpieces, with nuance and iconography suggesting both physical and metaphysical forces of life—spiritual, chlorophyllic, reproductive, etc. This work and similar works were publicly exhibited in prominent venues, discussed in major art journals and daily press publications, and acquired by museums.

Richard Loving. Copyright held by the artist's estate.

Richard Loving (artist)

Entire artwork

Yes

The image serves an informational and educational purpose as the primary means of illustrating a late stage and body of work in Richard Loving's career: his 2000s paintings which increasingly incorporated representational imagery such as brilliantly colored floral and landscapes into his largely abstract framework. These works metaphorically explore visionary and humanist subjects such as fecundity, growth and the irrepressibility of life. They initially featured spare, simplified forms (e.g., light fountains and comets) painted with his characteristic dashes and sometimes bracketed by otherworldly vertical blazes of light on the sides of the pictures, but gradually introduced more naturalistically rendered subjects (flowers, birds, trees and waterfalls). Critics suggest their mix of naturalism and enigmatic theatrical spaces complicated interpretation from literal toward more poetic and mysterious narrative, symbolic and metaphorical frameworks. Because the article is about an artist and his work, the omission of the image would significantly limit a reader's understanding and ability to visualize this key mature phase in his work, its reception and impact. Loving's work of this type and this work is discussed in the article and by critics cited in the article.

There is no free equivalent of this or any other of this series by Richard Loving, so the image cannot be replaced by a free image.

The image will not affect the value of the original work or limit the copyright holder's rights or ability to distribute the original due to its low resolution and the general workings of the art market, which values the actual work of art. Because of the low resolution, illegal copies could not be made.