Hannah Whiddon makes a name for herself in the Cape Region

Coastal Delaware wasn’t a place where Hannah Whiddon thought she would end up, but after three years here, it's become her forever home.

A native of Silver Spring, Md., Whiddon, 33, has become a frequent presence around the Cape Region in a short time. She and her works have been seen at large-scale events like Dogfish Head’s Analog A-Go-Go and at Schellville. She lives in Lewes with her roommates and her two cats, Ivy and Henry. Besides art, Whiddon said she still likes to surf and watch horror movies with her boyfriend, with “The Shining” and “The Strangers” as her personal favorites.

Whiddon came from an artistic family. Her father worked in the theater business around Washington, D.C., and she had been doing pencil drawings as a kid. She said in college at University of Maryland at College Park, she became friends with art majors and started taking art more seriously.

“I think I just liked it a lot. I liked the challenge of it. I say that everything I've learned about life, I’ve learned through art,” Whiddon said. “It’s humbling. It’s challenging. It’s all those things that I think are fulfilling about life.”

At first, art was a hobby she did on the side, with the occasional commission, which Whiddon said she found exciting. She soon began working with watercolors and doing portraits, which resulted in more commissions.

“Even the artists that can do portraiture don’t want to,” she said with a laugh. 

Whiddon said her mother, who worked in marketing and had a very practical outlook on her daughter’s life, suggested that maybe she should try doing art as a full-time career.

She started working with the Developing Artist Collaborative and working around local festivals and markets, particularly the Creative Market in West Rehoboth, which partners artists with local vendors. 

“All these small businesses who were much further along than me were extremely warm and gracious and welcoming, and bought stuff for me during the markets when nobody was buying. They answered all of my questions. No one was gate-keeping. It felt like a very safe place to take that leap,” Whiddon said.

She originally had planned to be a social worker; Whiddon has a graduate degree in social work from University of Maryland-Baltimore. Whiddon said she wanted to get into the field because she likes being curious about other people and their perspectives. She said that sense of curiosity carries over to her art career.

“That thing that artists have where they want to know and see everything, it's the same thing,” Whiddon said. “I think it's why I paint what I paint.”

Many of Whiddon’s works focus on feminine subjects, and she said water lends itself well to a feminine perspective.

“The spectrum of gentle and cold to very powerful and angry. There are lots of emotions that can be represented in water,” she said. “I spent a lot of time very intimately hearing women’s stories and experiences and perspectives. I think that translates to what I focus on and what I notice in my artwork.”

It didn’t start out that way. She now laughs at how as a youngster she enjoyed drawing pictures of Paris Hilton or Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow from the “Pirates of the Caribbean” films. She was into photography as a teenager, but as she got older, she became more interested in watercolors and figure studies. 

“It is really challenging to paint,” Whiddon said. “When I first started painting, I was interested in painting things that were beyond my technical skill. I had these things in my head, and I needed to find a way to translate that.”

To grow her technical skill, she answered the question of how to get to Carnegie Hall – practice. She said she paints five to eight hours a day, and takes weekends off for either rest or to do a market. Whiddon said her process is nearly halfway done when she actually stands in front of a blank canvas. She said she likes to start with some sort of image in mind, which usually comes through reference photos, but now can just be in her head.  

Whiddon is fairly new in Delaware, having moved here from Baltimore in 2020 after a relationship split. She said her parents had a home in coastal Delaware, and it was the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Her intention was to come to the Cape Region to regroup before heading back to Baltimore. But while she was here, she took up surfing as a hobby and that led to her staying longer. After a year, she had a sense that the Cape Region was home for her.

In the past, she said, her friends would tease her because she always said she wanted to move to a place she just visited.  

“I remember the first time I traveled [after moving here], I paid $150 to move my flight one day earlier because I wanted to be home. And that’s when I knew I didn’t want to be anywhere else,” Whiddon said.