When Brian Lies’ cat briefly went missing one day, the incident inspired a bit of anxiety—and a jaw-droppingly beautiful picture book. Imagining the adventures his pet might have embarked on, Lies dreamed up Cat Nap (Greenwillow Books, September 30), in which a kitten takes a tour of the masterpieces housed at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. To bring Kitten’s escapades to life, Lies worked by hand, re-creating everything from artwork adorning an Egyptian tomb to a Georgia O’Keeffe landscape. The story was named one of our Best Picture Books of 2025, and Lies told us more about it by email.
Say something about the book’s origins.
Our Russian blue/Siamese mix, Dylan, disappeared one day, and we couldn’t find him anywhere in the house. A few hours later, he reappeared, unruffled, but his whiskers were full of spiderwebs. We wondered where he had gone and surmised that he had found a wormhole in space and time—maybe he’d gone back to ancient Egypt, where cats were revered, and had adventures there! That idea morphed into a wider story about Kitten journeying through works of art from different times and cultures.
How did you select the artworks you re-created?
I paid a visit to the Met and threw my imagination out to pieces as I walked by them—how could Kitten interact with those characters? Or in this situation? At first, I chose highlights of the Met’s collection, such as a Van Gogh painting or Degas’ famous statue of a young ballerina. But I realized they would feel like parodies, so then I focused on lesser-known pieces and chose ones that I thought were a challenge but doable.
I did have to learn some new techniques, such as making two-part silicone molds and gilding. But that was the fun part—the self-dare of the thing!
Was there an especially challenging work to re-create? An especially rewarding one?
I had never carved wood before, so the [West African] Mblo portrait mask was the one I had the most doubts about. With wood carving, you have to be careful not to hack away too much at one time. It’s different with clay sculpture, because you can always add more to the piece as you go. But the most rewarding piece was the altarpiece of Saint Anthony of Padua. It was one of the first pieces that I finished and really gave me the sense that this whole crazy project was going to work. I’ll probably do more of this kind of work in the future.
Why was working by hand so satisfying?
As I wrote in the backmatter, it would’ve been much easier to do this whole project with Photoshop—simply splicing images of Kitten into photographs of old artwork. But that wouldn’t have a human feel to it, and I thought it would be cheating. I doubt many people would hold up a piece of art they had created through AI and say, “Look what I made!” with deep pride. It’s the computer that made the thing, and the human input was just the string of characters in the application’s prompt box.
I think that most of us value the time, thought, and effort that go into making something by hand. If we buy a hand-carved spoon in a small shop, I think we prize it more than something we pick out of a bin at a big box store. Things that we humans feel, think, and bring into the world—whether objects, images or words—still matter!
Mahnaz Dar is a young readers’ editor.
