Richard Givens grew up in Baltimore as a postwar child. Art was not something he was exposed to in the home nor at school during those youthful years. Drawing drew his attention while attending Clifton Park Junior High School. A required, basic drafting class piqued his interest but only summarily. At Morgan State College, an HBCU in northeast Baltimore City, he took general education classes for two years from 1965-1967. Deciding to head back into the workforce early, Richard looked for a job to support himself and through a friend’s recommendation, applied for an opening in the engineering department at Bethlehem Steel. It was 1967 and Givens was twenty-one years old. Surprisingly, Givens was offered the job with only his drafting experience from junior high leading him into a professional career. He was tasked with converting drawings from parts manuals into scaled drawings for machines in the Sparrows Point steel plant, visual motifs that would come to play in his own work in the following decade. During the late Sixties, he became excited and tuned-in to the psychedelic pop-art of American artist, Peter Max. Max’s work was everywhere in consumer culture and known throughout the world. The rich graphic and color-centric imagery appealed to Richard’s, now, professional drawing background. A book by M. C. Escher fell into his hands as well, and the possibles within the art of illusion took hold.  He states,

​

“I'm sure the counter culture movement and art of the times had an influence on me, I was a young person living [through] it, but it didn't motivate me to start painting.  The pop art of that time seemed to radiate energy and movement, and that did  influence me when I started painting.” 

​

In the same span of years, Richard became aware of the the complex optical spaces of Op-Art and how these practitioners utilized illusion through the manipulation of repetitive forms and lines. This work teased of altered perception, 1960s psychedelia, and even hallucination. Other artists like Venezuela’s Jesus Rafael Soto and Argentina’s Julio Le Parc had become renowned in the art world and, though by this time had moved into Kinetic art, their influence on painting concepts, beginning in the Fifties, had made significant impacts throughout contemporary art worldwide. Givens began line drawings on his breaks at Bethlehem Steel with no intentionality, no directive to make art, or of becoming an artist. He was simply drawing - letting his now stimulated drafting career guide a need for creative, personal expression. In 1972, Richard went to work for the Maryland Port Authority (MPA). It was at this time his mind exploded with energy and productivity, creating hundreds of drawings on letterhead graphpaper and other lined sheets. Exacting, mechanical, and diverse, these musings would soon become the impetus for copious paintings on paper. The earliest dated paintings are from 1976 and the transition to paint happened in these years. But in 1977, Givens left the MPA on a self-imposed, two year hiatus from professional work - the proverbial Lennon’s Lost Weekend. And for these two years, Richard spent much of his time, daily, painting in his house, amassing near 200 works in that timeframe. He claims it was Max that truly inspired him to transition into the color field, to start “painting in the lines” and to explore the possibilities of geometric abstraction. From then on, he painted at his kitchen table, creating a series of works on illustration board made first with flat latex paint. When this process and materials did not satisfy him, he moved onto using gloss enamel house paint, of which the fumes would later come to affect his health.


​

The majority of the work was completed between 1976 and 1979. After this time, Givens stopped making art. Four decades later, when COVID-19 hit and the world virtually stopped, he began working on art again to avoid any psychological spiral but rather than working with paint, he started utilizing digital technologies to create. With around 200 designs that had, at that point, only existed in his head, Givens began giving them form.