Paul Croft was born in 1963 in Belfast, Northern Ireland and currently lives and works in Aberystwyth on the West Coast of Wales. He studied Drawing and Painting at Edinburgh College of Art, specialising in Printmaking and later trained to become a Master Printer of Lithography at the world renowned Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico USA. In 2008 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter Printmakers, London. He has written two books on Stone Lithography (2001) and Plate Lithography (2003) published as part of the A&C Black Series of Printmaking Handbooks. He is a founding member, director and currently Chairman of Aberystwyth Printmakers.
Much of his work involves use of stone and plate lithography and woodcut printed using monotype and stencil printing. Throughout his career he has been predominantly concerned with the development of personal visual language, which has sought to synthesise motifs from a broad range of observation, still life and found objects, informed in large part by ongoing research into letter forms, characters, alphabets, and more recently, by his efforts to learn Mandarin.
He has exhibited his work widely throughout Ireland and the UK and internationally at galleries and museums in Germany, Japan, USA, Hong Kong, China, Australia and New Zealand.