Drawing became a serious occupation for her only in 1943 when returning from the evacuation, she went to Moscow secondary school specializing in art. In 1947, Leonova entered the V.I. Surikov Art College where her teachers were Kotov and Reshetnikov. Her graduation picture Children in the Theater was in the exhibition of graduation works of the students of art colleges of the whole USSR in 1954.
In 1958 she became a member of the Union of Artists of the USSR and has regularly participated in numerous exhibitions. Her first works were genre pictures following the traditions of the Soviet painters. Far from perfect, they revealed what would later develop in the artist's works, a sincere, human and lyrical understanding of the world.
Recently she has preferred to paint still lifes which are simple and beautiful. She likes to paint windows, following the traditions of Russian artists of the fin de sie'cle, such as Dobuzhinsky, Kustodiev and Zhukovsky. To paint a window is to show someone's life on the background of a landscape. It is a way of revealing the artist's philosophy of life. While the village windows in the pictures of Leonova show her admiration of the beautiful scenery and country life, the city windows are often associated with sad thoughts of human life. The ideas of loneliness of a human being in a big city is expressed. All the details have symbolic meaning.
All the work of the artist are full of poetical understanding of the world. The composition is always perfectly developed. The color range is noble and not very bright. The details are accurately chosen. Everything that is depicted is significant. The idea of the picture is always clear, although the techniques and the subjects vary greatly. The colors of her pictures reflect certain emotional conditions. Her landscapes are full of light, air and the sun, but the shapes are always distinct and never covered with the spots of lights.
She has her own creative attitudes, her own way of looking at the world and this way is both sincere and analytical. Her pictures tell us much about Russia, the people, their lives, thoughts and feelings. Although the genres she uses are sometimes underestimated by art critics, one should remember that there are no unimportant genres in painting.