REPUBLICAN AMERICAN

Litchfield artist opens gallery in Torrington

Jen Abbott-Tillou’s art work is about conflict and balance.

How she managed to come to art, after a long career as a physical therapist and trainer, is a story with much the same elements.

On April 6, Abbott-Tillou opened Gallery 7, a new gallery/studio on Main Street in Torrington, just across from the Warner Theater.

The gallery, which showcases her “contemporary-and-kinetic” sculpture, is a homecoming and departure for Abbott-Tillou, who graduated from Litchfield High School in 1983.

For nearly 17 years, since she graduated with a degree in physical therapy from Simmons College, Abbott-Tillou operated a successful physical therapy and personal training business in the tony Boston suburb of Wellesley. Her business, Fitness Therapists, mushroomed and grew. Abbott-Tillou was soon managing a successful company, raising two toddlers on her own (She and her first husband divorced after a short marriage), and preaching balance to her clients.

“I was preaching it, but I came to the realization that I was not living it,” said Abbott-Tillou, a fit-looking, blue-eyed blonde in faded overalls and a black tank. “I was a successful business owner. I owned a home. I had a business. It was a life that was working. It looked great on the outside, but it certainly wasn’t working for me.”

Always inclined toward artistic expression, Abbott-Tillou found her aesthetic drive buried, her life spinning – successfully – at warp speed, and her life oddly untenable. Her professional success, she said, “was a flashy thing that looks a certain way, but that’s a very superficial and shallow way to judge your experience. I didn’t live what I preached. I was giving too much of myself and I didn’t have the time for self-care.”

The five fundamentals she continually stressed with her clients – form, alignment, posture, fitness and feeling good – were not those she was practicing.

In 2001, she literally fell off the treadmill.

During a workout with a client, she fell, wedged her body between the treadmill and a wall and came, she said, to her senses. “I felt like God kicked me off the treadmill because I wasn’t budging from that grove.”

She took a month off. And then a year off. On a visit home to Litchfield, she found what she was missing: Grass. Lots and lots of full, rich, green grass.

“It was the green of the grass I saw in Litchfield that hit me the most,” she said. “It was like I had an epiphany.”

Abbott-Tillou, now sitting in the cluttered studio space of her upstairs Torrington gallery, said she had been practicing yoga and mindfulness during that time and realized that she needed to get her life more in balance. In 2008, near the height of the Great Recession, she sold her house and her business, rented a house in Litchfield and began investigating her long-dormant love of art.

Abbott-Tillou’s work mixes man-made objects – typically copper tubing or wire – with natural, “found” objects, like animal skulls, driftwood, distressed doors or metal objects. Copper tubes, which she uses with the fluency of graphite, coil around enormous, twisted pieces of driftwood. The tubes twist and extend; they cinch and confine; they spin and swivel. Much of her recent work is in the form of mobiles. These twisted copper forms hang and turn from nearly invisible fish wire, creating kinetic forms and shadows. The copper is not welded, but suspended. In one piece, copper and oxidized copper forms of a woman – breasts, swollen hips – laze against a piece of clear acrylic, where they can be changed and challenged.

“For me, creating is a spiritual process,” she has said. “When I start a new piece the inspiration usually comes from the energy and emotion of a life experience and the work unfolds during the process of creating. I love to watch what happens when constructing a mobile as the pieces move to create new shapes and shadows which subliminally add meaning to the piece.”

Self-taught, Abbott-Tillou has been creating sculpture for over 30 years and frequently involves the use of wood and wire. “I love to juxtapose the organic nature of driftwood and man-made objects,” said Abbott-Tillou. “I love conflict because I love conflicting emotions. That’s the human experience – pain and beauty. I love to put those things together.”

Abbott-Tillou found her current rental space in Torrington a year ago. The distressed wood interior and vintage doors – like something out of “The Maltese Falcon” – appealed to her love of old materials. “Torrington is dear to my heart,” said Abbott-Tillou, who recalls the city in finer days when it was a shopping venue for her family. “When I saw this space, it was just a no-brainer.”

Abbott-Tillou, whose father was an orthopedic surgeon at Charlotte Hungerford Hospital, initially intended to have the studio and gallery space for her own work. She has since reconsidered and her plan now is to open the gallery up to local artists, many of them as unsung as she was, to showcase their work.

“I have to do this,” said Abbott-Tillou. “This is really my passion and really who I am. I want to stop being a frustrated artist and just be an artist.”

Currently, Gallery 7 visits are by appointment, or Wednesdays and Fridays from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. For more information, visit www.JenAbbott-Tillou.com or call 617-365-5418.