Visual Artist. Storyteller. Explorer. `#chasingthecreative
Hello, I’m David Priestley — a visual artist based in Portsmouth, England, working across photography, abstraction, and visual storytelling.
The first photo I ever took was of a toy hovercraft balanced on the bonnet of my dad’s Sierra. I was six. I angled it to make the car look like the sea — all reflections, curves, and imagination. I didn’t know it then, but I was already telling a story with nothing but light, surface, and suggestion. That instinct never really left me.
I started with portraits — unscripted and honest — and after years exploring abstraction through motion and texture, I’ve come full circle. These days, I’m focused on people again. Not just to capture a face, but to frame a moment that feels like a still from a film that doesn’t exist. A suggestion of something bigger. A portrait that holds its breath.
My influences sit somewhere between cinema and stillness — Helmut Newton’s storytelling tension, Lindbergh’s emotional weight, Vadukul’s layered movement. I’m drawn to presence over polish, ambiguity over answers, and images that feel like they’ve already lived a life before you arrived.
While portraiture is my current focus, I still make time for abstraction — especially where it blends into the edges of story. Light, blur, silence. The feeling beneath the form.
I don’t care much for trends or rules. I care whether an image feels. If it makes you pause. If it lingers.
If any of this resonates — or you just want to talk ideas — I’d love to hear from you.
Thank you!