Cary Ambler Loving passed away November 10, 2025. Art was important to her from a young age. In her young adult days she took up photography and painting while working professionally. She studied printmaking at the Corcoran School in Washington D.C.. In all the places she lived and worked, the pursuit of artistic expression was always in the background of her life, but at the forefront of her dreams. In the 1990s she moved to Oakland to study at California College of Arts and Crafts and earn a Masters of Fine Arts, and she began to teach and pursue art full time.

Over her seven decades of creative life, Cary produced a prolific body of work in ceramics, painting, screenprinting, fresco, printing, drawing, and photography. Ever experimental, she specialized in her own process of “lumens” which used botanical printing and photo transfer onto collage, fresco and other surfaces. She taught at John Tyler Community College, VA, and South Plains College, TX, was selected for numerous juried shows and was published in numerous books. In Richmond she most recently held a solo exhibition in 2023 at Art Works.

In her last week of life, Cary completed her self-published book on her philosophy of the artist’s journey. She concluded with saying, “Perfection is not the goal. Experimentation and discovery and learning are what counts. Bringing who you are to the world with your art.” (Uploading this book online is forthcoming.)

Tributes to Cary Loving’s artistic influence can be posted on her website caryloving.com.

Her obituary can be found online at Richmond Times Dispatch.

My New Book: Luminous Botanicals; handmade lumen prints
https://www.blurb.com/b/11640811

My series "Calling" is featured in the juried publication, New American Paintings, South, Issue 148, published in March, 2021.

First Place, The Naked Print, Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts, January, 2019.

Uniqueness of Concept and Originality in exhibition Solitude, 2016, Still Point Arts Quarterly.

Best in Show - Single Image, Still Point Arts Quarterly, Simplicity, Winter 2015.

I'm pleased to have my work included in the 3rd edition (2015) of The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes by Christopher James. The chapter is "Light Markings", the last one, which discusses the freeing effect of digital imaging and how eventually it may allow photography to become fully integrated with all of the arts.

Summer - Image Transfer to Clay at John Tyler Community College, Midlothian, VA campus. Three Saturdays: July 13, 20, 27; 9 am - 3 pm.

John Tyler Community College, Midlothian, Virginia. Image Transfer to Clay (1 credit course). Three Fridays, July 13, 20, 27, 9 am - 3 pm. Image transfer to clay including making Stencil-Pro screens; printing with underglazes & glazes on raw clay, bisque & glazed ware, making and applying laser decals, photo lithography on clay. Using your own images and your own ceramics or store-bought new or used glazed ware or tiles.

John Tyler Community College, Midlothian, Virginia. Glaze Application - Glaze-making Workshop (1 credit course). Three Mondays, June 18, 25, July 2. Focus on cone 6 glazes.