Frances Rhea Basch Summer 2026 — Kiesendahl + Calhoun Fine Art, Ltd.

Frances Rhea Basch

Lawn Alley, 12 x 12, oil on panel (Copy)

Limits Yard, 12x9, oil on paper (Copy)

Illusion in Kingsburg, 12 x 16, oil on paper (Copy)

Peninsula Dusk, 12 x 16, oil on linen (Copy)

Pond Tree, 9x12, oil on linen (Copy)

Town Yard, 12x12, oil on panel (Copy)

Oldtown Sea View, 12x12, oil on panel (Copy)

Paradise, 36 x 36, oil on linen (Copy)

Pink Haze, 10.25 x 12.75, oil on paper (Copy)

Solo Tree, 13.5 x 15, oil on paper (Copy)

Pond, 11x14, oil on panel (Copy)

Stonehurst September Eight, 9x11.5, oil on paper (Copy)

Artist bio/Statement

Bio: Frances Rhea Basch -Born March 1941- Died March 2003

Education: University of Miami, Florida, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Art Students League. NYC, Woodstock School of Art.

Granddaughter of Nathan Handwerker, founder of “Nathan’s Famous” Hotdog empire, Frances Rhea Basch put aside familial and financial considerations early in life to pursue a career as a visual artist. After receiving her degree in Michigan, Basch moved to Woodstock, New York, to study with Arnold Blanch at the Art Student’s League’s summer school. While there, the artist developed an obsession with the description of form using line and color. Working large and fast, her figurative paintings caught the attention of other working artists and she became a favorite in the Arnold Blanch milieu. Working fervently within the 1969 Woodstock community, Basch became restless and eventually boarded a sailboat with two companions and sailed to Key West, where she became the owner/operator of a beachside cafe. When the AIDS epidemic and drugs ravaged her close circle of friends, Basch moved back “home” to Woodstock, where she reordered her life and resumed painting in earnest. While establishing friendships with Woodstock’s faculty and students, Basch devoted the last twelve years of her life to landscape and figure painting, mostly in watercolor, expressed in vibrant and sensuous hues.

Her process combines observation and invention creating paired down compositions of dwellings and structures in her surroundings. Many of her paintings contain tension between representational and flat space and a human narrative absent of figures. Schellenberg attended The School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and received an MFA in Painting from University at Albany, NY. Over her long career she has exhibited extensively in the US and Canada. Recent solo exhibits in Pennsylvania have been at The Susquehanna Art Museum, Harrisburg, and at Lancaster Galleries. In Maine she is represented by The Willard Gallery. Her paintings have been acquired by many private and public collections. Commissioned works are in health care and corporate centers including Milton Hershey Medical Center, Penn Medicine, and LL Bean. Schellenberg is Emerita Prof of Art at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania where she taught drawing and painting for 20 years.

Living and working in both Nova Scotia and Central Pennsylvania, I respond to the landscape and environment through my painting process. Being outdoors is the anchor and inspiration for all my work. The urgency of painting with oils in changing light and fleeting conditions is something I relish: working between vantage point and the painting’s surface, moving between representation and abstraction with fluid brushwork.

Seeking a deeper emotional connection to the communities we inhabit I often paint juxtapositions between nature and human built structures. Many works include architecture, spaces in between buildings, backyards, hidden views, and the geometry of boundaries.

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Gallery at The Lodge at Woodloch

109 River Birch Lane, Hawley, PA 18428