“It’s funny,” she continued. “But people asked me many times, ‘are you sorry?’ And I say no, because if I had been an artist, I’d be living in a box.”

An education in biology led her to a career in teaching, which introduced her to the Village she now calls home—spending most of her 31-year career as a Blind Brook High School educator. From 1982 through 2007, while living in Hastings, she mostly oversaw earth science classes, though she had swings in biology and chemistry. Her favorite course was an ethics seminar geared toward sparking engagement in students shying away from a rigorous science curriculum.

It wasn’t until her retirement that she found herself actually moving to Rye Brook, where her systematic mind could start focusing on art full-time.

A successful teaching career enabled Dorne to do art in the way she feels it should be done—for her own fulfillment, enjoyment and expression, not as a means of survival. Even now as an accomplished crafter who has had pieces featured and winning awards in exhibitions and juried shows across small galleries in New York City and the arts societies of Greenwich, Old Greenwich, Scarsdale and New Rochelle, she makes no money.

“I don’t sell them,” she said. “I know, the price of everything is what someone will pay for it. But if I were to sell each piece, it would have to be thousands of dollars, because each piece represents months of my life and my whole heart and soul being poured onto the canvas.”

“Everything has a price, but you can’t meet mine,” she continued with a chuckle. “They’re sort of like my children, because each one takes months and I become intimately involved in the picture. When I paint people, I feel like I’m living with that person; it’s a very intense thing. So…can you sell your children?”

Though they can’t be owned, her work can be viewed on Dorne’s website www.artbyleila.net. 

Before retirement, Dorne dabbled in art that lacked a shtick, as she put it. There would be a picture here and there of random people or happenings, but no underlying theme around her phases. But that changed when she found herself with time to adequately entertain her passion.

It started with theology and a fascination into exploring how different people worship. Two trains of thought on tracks of contrasts and similarities came out of that era. Through canvases, Dorne would speak to socioeconomic differences seen in practices of the same religion, and to places of significance shared by many.

She’d find Hindu temples that were once Greek Orthodox, churches that were once synagogues. Israel is, of course, particularly interesting, as a place of sanctity for the three dominating monotheistic beliefs.

“I had lived most of my life as a secular person not practicing religion at all, and I think this was part of my journey back toward practicing. But who knew that was where it was going to lead,” said Dorne, who was raised in a Conservative Jewish household and now is a member of Congregation KTI.

Studying holy practices and values helped her rationalize her own understanding of spirituality, she described, and the draw she was feeling back to a life of faith.

Dorne’s process is meticulous and long—as could be expected by a scientist turned artist. It can take weeks for her to perfect the lines of a building or curvature of the letters; she’s painstakingly cautious every time her acrylic tipped brush hits the canvas.

“But it’s OK if it takes weeks; I’ve got to get it right,” she said. “Because if it’s not perfect, I’m not happy. And if I’m not happy, what am I doing it for?”

Everything starts with photographs. “I’m not the type who can just paint from my head. Maybe if I had done it all along and lived in that box, I’d be able to, but I can’t,” she laughed. And ethically, she firmly believes those pictures must be taken by her—both because she knows she has permission, and it’s the only reference of her own eye.

“I’m an artist, I think you’re beautiful and I want to paint you”: the line she always gives subjects when asking if she can see them through the lens. And her results are human—whether she captures elderly women sticking their tongue out at the camera, or an intimate conversation in a cramped New York City café, Dorne aims to capture humanity.

However, her paintings are never replications of a single picture—it’s a collage, pieces patched together as a composite of different scenes and people, giving each section of the canvas unique life.

Most final products contain words, either literature, newspaper clippings or original poetry Dorne once wrote in a previous life. “There’s always words because words are important to me,” she said. “It’s literary art, which may be a name I made up for the genre.”

Others have items plastered on for emphasis—beads, fabric, or in one case, her own hair.

It’s messy, intentionally; it’s the way she sees the world.

“I don’t think art should just be pretty, and certainly no one could accuse me of having pretty art,” she said, frankly. “It’s supposed to make you think and each picture tells its own story. So, it’s not pretty. To me, saying it’s pretty would be an insult.”

Dorne’s current artistic era, producing the exhibition at Greenburgh Town Hall titled “On Edge,” features eight paintings dedicated to the atmosphere around the Village of Port Chester in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.

In Summer 2020, the entire country was on edge—whether it was protests over race-fueled police brutality, or fear of such demonstrations leading to looting and violence. Dorne was inspired by the Westmore News’s coverage on the local impact, the dichotomy seen when businesses downtown boarded up their windows out of a fear over a massive protest attracting 2,000 people that was ultimately perfectly peaceful.

She felt spoken to when the article gave room for the layperson’s voice and wanted to depict that type of humanity while memorializing the times. The newspaper helped her “crystalize” what she was going to do, and therefore is featured in the pieces.

“I didn’t go to the march because I’m too old to go to jail and not have them bring me my proper medication and half-decaf coffee, but I read the story, and it was 100 percent peaceful,” Dorne said. “My favorite quote was ‘the only color visible was the color of love,’ and that’s one of the paintings I have in the show.”

“I did go to Port Chester a few days before the protest and took photographs of the boarded-up stores, and I thought it was understandable on one level and terrible on another level. It was such a complicated time; I had a lot of feelings on it,” she added. “Everybody believes something, and people can contribute in different ways. It’s my very small contribution that I can paint about it, to show even in this year, people are discriminated against and even murdered because of the color of their skin.”

She thinks the Town of Greenburgh was interested in her work because it’s a noncontroversial way of sending the blatant message: Black Lives Matter. 

It’s unclear how long the paintings will be there—Dorne thinks they’ll stay up through fall, until officials find something else to showcase. 

But she’s happy her works were selected to surround the building’s tax office. It makes her smile to know in September, as school taxes came due, hordes of people acted as a captive audience, embracing a small distraction from their financial burden to look at art that at the very least made them think.