Richard Kingston was born into a farming family, and he left school at the age of nine to work on the farm. He was a self-taught artist, and studied arts and engineering at Trinity College before moving to London, where he worked as a teacher and designer. In the late 1950s he returned to Ireland and took up painting full time. He was a sensitive artist who was mostly inspired by nature and the Irish countryside where he grew up. He was influenced by
Abstract Expressionism and was one of the first Irish artists to embrace aspects of American Abstract Expression in the 1950s. The structure and colour in his paintings were unlike that of his contemporaries. In Canal we see how Kingston allows the paint take on a life of its own, almost lifting off the canvas.

Kingston exhibited at the Hendriks Gallery, Dublin, and the Leicester Galleries, London, and represented Ireland in several international shows. In the 1970s he founded his own gallery, the Wellington Gallery in Ballsbridge, where he held numerous solo exhibitions. His Causeway series of paintings were shown in Dublin at the RHA Gallagher Gallery and the Solomon Gallery in 2001. He has been an
active member of the Royal Hibernian Academy since 1980, and also served on the board of governors of the National Gallery of Ireland from 1982 to 1989. His work is
held in major public and corporate collections, and private collections in Ireland, UK, Canada, Japan, Australia and
the United States.