By Howard Pousner

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

If you’re a fan of images of Santa Claus, it’s the most wonderful time of the year. That’s especially true if you enjoy illustrator Haddon Sundblom’s classic take on Jolly St. Nick swigging a certain soft drink from Atlanta, now being revived on Coca-Cola billboards everywhere.

For Atlanta artist Flora Rosefsky, Hanukkah is also a most wonderful time of the year. The Jewish artist hasn’t achieved Sundblom-sized fame, but she’s doing her part to represent her faith, especially noticeable in mid-December when Christmas images are ubiquitous.

Rosefsky has a 4-foot-square mixed media collage, “Personal Sanctuary” currently on view at Mason Murer Fine Art and several spiritually themed works in a holiday show at Decatur’s Sycamore Place Gallery & Studios, where she creates out of a jam-packed space not much bigger than a walk-in closet. In a just-opened exhibit at the Quinlan Visual Arts Center in Gainesville, she’s showing “Songs of Praise,” a 40-by-60-inch collage of birds, one of three colorful cut-paper pieces that recall French artist Henri Matisse.

These seasonal shows do not count other places where Rosefsky’s Judaic-themed pieces are on permanent display, such as the stained-glass windows she designed for Temple Kehillat Chaim in Roswell. There, the Torahs and tallises seem to fly from windows above the ark, in the spirit of famed Russian-French artist Marc Chagall.

Nor does it include the series of 12 folk-arty drawings of Jewish events and holidays, including Hanukkah, at the William Breman Jewish Home. Or her 1998 quilt celebrating Israel’s 50th anniversary on view at the William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum.

Jewish faith and customs, in particular, and spiritualism generally have been touchstones in Rosefsky’s career from the New York native’s first major solo exhibit, at the Binghamton, N.Y., Jewish Community Center in 1992, to today.

Early in her career, maybe 20 percent of her work was inspired by faith and 80 percent by more secular ideas. Today, the ratio has flip-flopped, for reasons Rosefsky, 68, struggles a bit to explain.

“Something’s leading me toward it; I don’t know,” she says. “This is where I want to be right now. I could do abstract art, landscapes, maybe do something that’s more saleable, but I think I have to do what’s in my heart.”

What’s in Rosefsky’s heart, says Lebanon-born artist Helen Zughaib, is a true empathy for humanity filtered through her faith.

“Flora is a very spiritual person,” says the Washington-based artist with whom Rosefsky shared a 2007 exhibit at ART Station in Stone Mountain, “Shalom & Salaam: Sharing Our Traditions.” “I feel as if her work is a living reflection of her faith, full of joy and exuberance, hope and healing.”

Transcendent images

Indeed, Rosefsky’s depictions of Jewish traditions make the religion seem like the most joyful on God’s green earth. A Torah procession is shown to be as high-stepping as the Rockettes. Costumed Purim celebrants could pass for Mardi Gras revelers. A bride and groom are raised up in their chairs so exuberantly by wedding guests for the traditional Hora dance that they look like they’re about to lift off.

When it’s brought up to Rosefsky that those observances include Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, marking 10 days of repentance for sins and including a central prayer about “who shall live and who shall die,” she concedes that indeed some holidays can be “introspective.”

But then she ponders for a moment and points out that Yom Kippur, the day of atonement that culminates the New Year observation, is followed only five days later by the harvest festival of Sukkot, “which is totally joyful.”

Rosefsky’s depictions are not only inspired by the meaning of the holidays, however, but by the warmth of observing them with loved ones. That started when she was a child growing up in a “traditional, conservative” home in Brooklyn. Her father was the eldest of nine siblings, so there were countless cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents who gathered for holidays, especially for those involving food.

“The Passover seders were always these huge affairs with all the relatives,” Rosefsky recalls. “So it imbued in me certainly the joy of our heritage. The synagogue, yes, it’s important, but I think it was my home, my grandparents, what we did in our house [that loomed larger]. In fact, the Hebrew word for table means ‘altar,’ so that what we do in our homes is important.”

Before reinventing herself as an artist, Rosefsky was a homemaker and frequent volunteer with the important and challenging job of raising four children. She had graduated with an education degree from Syracuse University in 1962, but taught only a few months before taking maternity leave, never to return to teaching.

She was in her 30s when she took graduate extension courses in art at Syracuse. Her teacher and early inspiration James Ridlon called her “the Civilian” because she was the only one without an art degree.

But the Civilian, it was clear from the start, was no pedestrian artist. Rosefsky said her earliest pieces were all about the joy of art-making —“pure pleasure, like a kindergarten kid taking a brush and experimenting with paint. There was no narrative to it, no story.”

When she later decided she wanted to “communicate something,” she turned to Jewish texts and her heritage, which provided plentiful material.

But while the subject matter has been a constant, her form of expression keeps evolving. For instance, the 1999 “Tradition Series” and her “Ritual Series” (2006-’07) depict many of the same moments, but the collages in the later series are looser, more sophisticated and abstracted than the sweet, more straightforward marker pen drawings of the former.

Beyond her media and materials, Rosefsky is also getting more sophisticated in her forms of expression. “Songs of Praise,” the large collage now on view at Quinlan Arts Center in Gainesville, for example, on first blush would appears to be simply lovely cutouts of birds taking wing.

But in her artist’s statement, Rosefsky conveys how their “early morning sounds seem to be one long, continuous song, which becomes a metaphor for the constant praising of God. In the Jewish synagogue service, prayers of praise are repeated over and over again in variations that parallel the repetitive songs of birds.”

It’s work like this that causes Temple Kehillat Chaim Rabbi Harvey Winokur to praise the artist for “transcending traditional imagery and bringing a fresh perspective to Jewish symbols and customs. Flora reaches into her personal spiritual perceptions and relates them to the Jewish stories and holidays.”

A respect for faith

Though it’s not overtly rooted in Judaism, Rosefsky has begun a “Shelter & Sanctuary” series that draws on her faith and includes a major work now on view at Sycamore Place. “Take Time” is a collaged tribute to her late father-in-law Harry Rosefsky, who made a living selling burlap bags to southern New York state farmers who raised cabbage, potatoes and onions. Like many children of the Depression, he hated to throw anything out, keeping receipts dating to the 1920s, for instance.

The collage includes some of those receipts, 1 cent postage stamps, pieces of letters from grandkids and friends, and a flyer from the Binghamton Bag and Burlap Company that imparts life lessons including, “Take time to laugh – it is the music of the soul. Take time to give – it’s too short a day to be selfish.”

Along with her reluctant father-in-law and his papers, Flora Rosefsky and her husband, Bernie, moved to Atlanta in 1995, where two of her four children and two of her seven grandchildren live. Having spent childhood Sabbaths baking challah rolls with her grandmother Celia Leff every weekend in Brooklyn as a child, she treasures living close to grandchildren of her own.

“Coming to Atlanta was a big move,” says Rosefsky, who lives with her husband in an apartment off North Druid Hills Road. “I had to move from the area where my husband was born and raised, and I had lived there for 35 years. We had to leave behind a house and start anew. But I tell people what’s really important is not the physical structure of where you’re living but who you’re living with.”

She and her husband of 47 years, who recently retired from real estate sales, joined the Ahavath Achim Synagogue. She’s also a member of the Interfaith Sisters group that meets regularly at Rock Springs Presbyterian Church and explores religious places throughout the city. Her sisters of faith and even members of her DeKalb Medical Center mall-walkers group, regardless of their religious affiliations, always want to hear about her latest creations and attend her exhibit openings.

“I’ve come to find in the South,” Rosefsky says, “that there’s a sensibility of appreciation and respect for people who follow their faith.”

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On view

Flora Rosefsky has works included in ...

“Every Day Is a Holiday.” Through Jan. 1 at Sycamore Place Gallery & Studios, 120 Sycamore Place, Decatur. By appointment. 404-377-7747, contact Sylvia Cross at sycsyl@yahoo.com.

“25th National Collage Society Juried Exhibition.” Through Dec. 30 at Mason Murer Fine Art, 199 Armour Drive, Atlanta. 404-879-1500, www.masonmurer.com.

“Collage at the Q,” works by the Atlanta Collage Society. Through Feb. 20 at Quinlan Visual Arts Center, 514 Green St., Gainseville. 770-536-2575, www.quinlanartscenter.org.

For more on Rosefsky’s art, see www.florageart.com.