Siena, 2024

I wanted to capture my daughter in the whimsical world she inhabits. It’s a very pure and fleeting moment in life that I wanted to remember as a mother – and I wanted to honour her vivid imagination. There is something both regal and playful about it. She’s the queen of her own dreams. “Children are notoriously hard to paint, and not simply because they won’t sit still,” said Sydney Morning Herald art critic John McDonald when awarding this painting as winner of the 2023 Brisbane Portrait Prize Salon des Refusés. “Paint an older person and you are striving to capture a lifetime’s experience in a face and form. With a child, that life is yet to be lived… I liked the way Siena’s face subtly echoes the rabbit headgear, and the self-confidence in her expression. Painted with painstaking care, but not redolent of photography, it’s a work that instantly arrests one’s attention.”

Alissa Brooke Lamb is a Brisbane-based emerging artist.

She is a two-time winner (2023 & 2024) and four-time finalist of the Brisbane Portrait Prize Salon des Refusés.

She was also selected in the 2024 Brisbane Portrait Prize finalist exhibit held at the Queensland State Library, where her work was used as the headline image on the iconic building’s entrance.

Sydney Morning Herald art critic John McDonald describes Alissa’s work as ‘quirky’, ‘theatrical’, transcending of clichés and able to ‘instantly arrest one’s attention’.

Alissa holds a Bachelor of Behavioural Studies from the University of Queensland.