Deborah
Hake Brinckerhoff

Deborah Hake Brinckerhoff is a painter and mixed-media artist trained at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). She grew up in Vermont, lived in Salt Lake City for twenty-two years, and now works from her studio in Oregon. She has been a working artist for over thirty years and ran a fine art painting business for twenty-five.

Her painting is figurative and abstract at once — the figure rendered in palette knife, surfaces spread "generously, like butter," rich in color, with the visual and emotional weight of her subjects asserted through paint behavior rather than careful description. She seeks to represent and communicate human character: the push and pull of human interaction, the small moments that may slip past the casual observer. "My paintings are representational of the subject but not necessarily accurate to real life," she has said.

For most of her career she had formal gallery representation, including extended representation at Salt Lake City's Phillips Gallery, where she has been reviewed by Utah's 15 Bytes art magazine. In 2019 she left the gallery system to work directly with collectors, prioritizing connection over distance. Her current practice extends into Soul Portraits — a mixed-media healing practice that uses personal materials (letters, photographs, journal pages) to compose meaningful works for individuals.

She has been profiled in 15 Bytes, Voyage Utah Magazine, CanvasRebel, and Bold Journey. Her work is held in private collections across the United States and abroad.