Laura Pacchini’s path to painting looped through cities, disciplines, and decades before stretching into the practice she maintains today in San Francisco.
Trained in graphic design and art direction, with some formative roles at Williams Sonoma and Pottery Barn Kids, Pacchini spent years shaping visual narratives for brands. Now, she creates them for herself — on canvas, on birch panels, and across walls.
“I have always wanted to be an artist,” she says, tracing that impulse back to childhood museum visits in St. Louis and formative encounters with exhibitions that made art feel accessible and alive. A later move to New York exposed her to the bold colors and graphic sensibility of David Hockney, a contrast to the classical traditions she also encountered. “His colors were so vibrant… that really stayed with me.”
Though initially discouraged from attending art school, she pursued painting and art history, studying abroad in Florence and later apprenticing in England. Her early work leaned graphic, a sensibility that translated seamlessly into a career in design. After time in New York advertising, she relocated to San Francisco in the mid-1990s, where she worked at Landor before moving into in-house creative roles and, eventually, the startup world.
Motherhood shifted her pace but not her visual thinking. “Even in design, you’re always art directing — setting a scene,” she reflects. That instinct carried into her fine art practice, which deepened during her MFA at the Art Institute of San Francisco. There, her work initially focused on portraiture, including a series on political whistleblowers. But a pivotal moment came during the COVID-19 pandemic, when she helped lead a mural project transforming a Presidio field hospital. Using low- and zero-VOC paints, she and a team of artists created calming landscapes for isolated patients.
“That’s when it all shifted,” she says. “I started thinking about nature, about the climate, about what’s around me.”
Her current work — often painted en plein air or finished from photographs — captures landscapes in both Northern California and Italy, where she travels frequently with her husband and son. These places are intertwined in her practice. “Wherever I am, I’ll paint my surroundings,” she says. “It’s like a diary.”
Working primarily with low-VOC house paint, Pacchini embraces both its practicality and its ethos. “It’s better for the environment. It dries quickly. I can mix colors exactly how I want.” The result is a body of work that is stylized yet rooted in keen observation — echoing, almost accidentally, the painterly style of Fairfield Porter.
Now, with a hundred works behind her, Pacchini continues to paint not to escape the world, but to register it. “The landscape is ever changing,” she says. “This is how I keep track.”
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Photos provided by Laura Pacchini
