Charles Richard Haines was born in Marian, Iowa on December 29, 1906. After growing up on a typical Midwestern farm he began his studies at the Minneapolis School of Art. While teaching at the Minneapolis School of Art he became interested in mural painting. In 1933 he won the Vanderlip Traveling Scholarship and began studying at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Fontainebleau, France.

Shortly after returning to the United States he became involved in the New Deal government sponsored art programs. He won nine mural commissions from the Treasury Department's Section of Painting and Sculpture between 1935 and 1941. The murals were primarily done in U.S. Post Offices. Haines moved to Los Angeles in 1941 where he began teaching at the Chouinard Art Institute. Later, from 1954-1974 he became the head of the painting department at Otis Art Institute.

Haines was a principal figure in the West Coast Modernist school, and worked alongside artists like Francis De Erdely, Edgar Ewing, and others. Dalzell Hatfield, a prominent gallery owner in Los Angeles say Richard Haines's paintings captured, "a meandering silence, a pause in time, a captive moment, all of which tend to reveal the spiritual values of humanity while depicting its physical form."

His ouevre includes murals, sculpture, paintings, watercolors and prints. The artist developed a distinctive style of representation, which was influenced by cubist and abstracted geometric work. Although some of his paintings are composed of many broken planes of color, others, especially some of his figurative works, are marked by simplicity.