Illustration: Brian Lies

Inspired by his bewhiskered muse, Lies spent the next year obsessively crafting a children’s book (Cat Nap, Harper Collins, Sept. 30) about a kitten who chases a mouse through a series of exhibits in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Lies, an award-winning children’s book author and illustrator with a career spanning nearly four decades, gave himself an added challenge: recreating each work of art from scratch, with the kitten rendered in the style of the masterpiece.

Though he had built his career as an acrylic painter, Lies learned how to carve in the West African Mblo tradition, made quick austere strokes of Japanese sumi ink across paper, and applied gold leaf with rabbit-skin glue to reconstruct a 14th-century Italian portrait of St. Anthony of Padua.

“Part of the excitement about the process was to feel what the people who originally created the pieces felt,” Lies says. “The goal is to be as close to the original creators’ experiences as possible.”

Other scenes find the prancing kitten causing chaos in a stained-glass-style medieval marketplace, lost in an abstract Georgia O’Keefe painting, and facing down a ceramic canine wrought in the style of ancient Mexico’s Remojadas culture. 

ILLUSTRATION: BRIAN LIES

“One of the challenges of doing this is carrying on through uncertainty when you’re not sure how it’s going to turn out, but just moving onward,” Lies says. He’s familiar with persevering in the face of uncertainty. Following a college career cranking out satirical sketches for the Brown Daily Herald, he at first struggled to find a job as a political cartoonist after 140 newspapers rejected his art portfolio. He later put himself through Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts and started getting regular gigs with newspapers like the Boston Globe and the Christian Science Monitor.

But Lies really wanted to make children’s books. When he stumbled into a publishing director in line at a store, he got his shot. Nearly 30 illustrated books later, Cat Nap is his way of showing that you can always keep learning new skills.

“I was one of those people who never thought I could actually grow up to be a real artist,” Lies says. He hopes that kids whose abilities do not yet match their artistic aspirations will find inspiration in his journey: “He didn’t think he could do this and he did. So, what about me?”