Born in Selkirk in 1955, Alfons Bytautas studied painting at Edinburgh College of Art, where he first began to develop his life-long interest in the technique of etching. Soon after graduating in 1979, he started to collaborate with Edinburgh Printmakers, working for 30 years as a Master Printer and Senior Etching Technician. In 1983, he studied at the Parisian printmaking studio, Atelier 17, with the celebrated painter and printmaker Stanley William Hayter.
Bytautas has led important pioneer research on printmaking, especially developing acrylic resist etching and photopolymer techniques. He has held workshops and master classes at festivals in the UK, Netherlands, Japan, Belgium and Spain ever since.
Having widely exhibited over the last 30 years, Bytautas was elected an Associate Member of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1994 and became an Academician in 2006. In addition to his accomplished work as an artist, Bytautas holds a position at the Fine Art Printmaking Studio at Northumbria University, in Newcastle upon Tyne.
"Alfons Bytautas made his reputation with strongly drawn, naturalistic etchings, but has reinvented himself as a master of abstract collage. A quiet pun in the title of one, Back to Nature, hints that for him nature is not to be found in naturalism, after all." - Duncan MacMillan, The Scotsman