Walking down the steps of Peter Leclair’s basement studio on Northwoods Cresent on Sunday, guests were greeted with a striking wooden sculpture, Silk and Satin.
It’s a female figure, holding a purse, struggling to break free from the wall of neckties holding her down. Fragmented ladders are carved into the walls of a plateau behind her. The figure is reaching, but she can’t quite get where she wants, almost falling back into the crowd of ties.
Much of the work hung around the walls were priced. But this one read NFS — not for sale. It was a favourite of his son’s, he said, and of his late wife, Marie.
Two women entered the studio, holding watercolour prints of fruit, telling Leclair they came over at the behest of his neighbour down the street, where Bella Bressard, 16, was showcasing her work in an outdoor booth outside her home on the windy fall day.
Leclair tells the women the drawing of an eye hung among his sculptures is hers.
“She’s done quite a bit, improved quite a bit,” he said, looking at her latest prints.
Our art is so different, yet we still relate on our passion for it
Bella Bressard
On the 35th year of Apples and Art Studio Tour, Leclair, a founding committee member of the festival, reflected the growth of Cornwall’s art community over his 50-year career, the process of creation after the loss of his partner, and the future of art from a much younger peer from down the street.
When he finished St. Lawrence College’s art program at the Cornwall campus in 1972 — the first graduating cohort — he pursued a career in graphic design but soon fell out of love with the work.
“I was always doing what someone else wanted, what someone else needed. I was not too happy,” he said.
When he came across the work of famed assemblage artist Joseph Cornell, a sculptor from New York whose work has been displayed at the Museum of Modern Art, Leclair found his calling.
“This is it,” he said upon seeing Cornell’s work. “This is what I’ve been looking for.”
For decades, Leclair scoured flea markets and garage sales in search of the right parts for his mixed-media sculptures, calling it “selective collecting.” He isn’t out on the hunt anymore, as he’s got too much stuff, he said, pointing to the assorted pile of bric-a-brac strewn across his desk: chunks of old an electric piano keyboard, doorknobs and faucets and other discarded items that may one day form a new piece.
“There’s more in the back,” he said.
When Leclair started, there wasn’t much space to display his work around town. Back then, Cornwall was an industrial city dominated by giants like Domtar and Courtaulds.
“There were a lot of artists who didn’t have an outlet,” he said.
So he built it up; first, an art gallery in along First and Pitt streets, then later on Second and Pitt, of which the Kline gallery became an offshoot, he said.
“If I remember correctly — I was the first exhibitor in all three of them.”
He also helped create the Apples and Art Studio Tour in 1991, when he returned to Cornwall from Scarborough.
This year’s festival featured 42 studios to visit across Cornwall and SDG, and even more artists on showcase — considerably more than in 1991.
At the Cline House alone, three artists showcased their works across three different media. Candice Nixon, Linda Norton and Tracy-Lynn Chisholm respectively presented glass art, Gouache, graphite and water colour, and oil paintings.
“It’s a huge event,” said Norton. “It gets you exposure, and people go out and look at art. That doesn’t happen all year round.”
“We are a smaller city, but we have such a bubble community of artists and are very supportive of each other,” said Chisholm, who started presenting her work at Apples and Art around 1997 or 1998.
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Leclair said he is pleased with the festival’s evolution.
“(I) can’t say I’m surprised,” he said. “But a lot of people have taken advantage of it.”
He isn’t too involved with the various committees these days, though.
He described his sculptures as esoteric, and “from my interior self.”
He said he sits on the floor of his studio, tinkering with his different pieces until, suddenly, “the objects start to speak. Then the real work begins.
“It’s magic, really. I don’t know where it comes from — The universe, somewhere — but it happens.”
To guide his audience through the interiority of his work, he leaves elaborate titles as a door into his mind.
One sculpture of a metal figure swirling up from a wooden canister and holding two platters of coloured balls was called: “I am your genie … guiding you to the windows of universal love.”
“He’s kind of like an art philosopher” said Emily Macleod, visual arts coordinator at the Cline Gallery. “He doesn’t say it; he shows it.”
The latest work he showcased at Apples and Art was mostly created in the aftermath of his wife’s death, who passed away on Sept. 23, 2024. For a whole year, he couldn’t produce much of anything. Then, suddenly, it poured out of him.
He’d be in bed all night, he said, fixated on a piece that was bothering him until he’d come down to the studio, determined work until he’d find the answer.
“Oh, that object belongs on that other piece — not there,” he’d tell himself,” rearranging the sculptures before leaving to finish them off in the morning.
Once he got going, he couldn’t stop; he said he managed to do three years’ worth of work in six months.
“I must say, it’s quite refreshing to be able to do this without any distraction — not to insult her,” he said, briefly turning his gaze to a photo of his wife on the wall. “Anyway, she’d be pleased with the latest stuff I’ve been doing.”
Grade 11 student Bella Brossard, with her artwork, was encouraged to participate in this year’s Apples and Art Studio tour by Peter Leclair. She displayed some of her work on Sunday, Sept. 27, 2026 in Cornwall, Ont. Nick Dunne / Cornwall Standard-Freeholder
Down the street from Leclair, it’s the second Apples and Art showcase for Bressard in three years. The Grade 11 student from École secondaire publique L’Héritage has been drawing her whole life, starting with doodles of her fellow classmates as she struggled to pay attention in class.
Much early work focused on the human eye, but “it got a bit repetitive,” she said, now focusing on water colours. She’s struck up a bit of a friendship with the elder artist over the years.
When he learned of her artistic sensibilities, he lent her some of his old paint, and encouraged her to apply for Apples and Art.
While she’s drawn to realism, she took Leclair’s advice to try new media.
“This was me just letting go and letting my art be messy for once,” pointing to her more recent works, focusing on fruit and European city scenes.
Changing her style to something more impressionistic was scary, she said.
Bressard said she is grateful for the work Leclair put into fostering the arts community, where she’s managed to sell her work and pick up gigs doing face-painting since her first Apples and Art.
She said she feels a connection to Leclair.
“Our art is so different, yet we still relate on our passion for it,” she said. “Maybe I can learn how to be more free and abstract like him.”
Asked if he’d give her any advice, he politely declined.
“She’s coming up well,” he said. “She’s going to be OK.”
Nick Dunne is an award-winning (and award-losing) journalist at the Standard-Freeholder.
He has worked in Cornwall, Ottawa and Sudbury.
NiDunne@postmedia.com