Issue 12 · 15 June 2026
On the kittens who taught me that play with no purpose is exactly the point — and why a guitar, a workbench, and a tablet all do the same quiet job.
No purpose. Just play.
I drew constantly as a kid. Long before the salon, before the toolroom, I was the boy filling the margins of every page in the house. I never stopped wanting to. What took me most of my life to find wasn't the wanting — it was the right way to do it.
That arrived at the start of the pandemic. The world went still, and I picked up a tablet and a stylus almost without thinking about it. For the first time the tool matched the want. Nothing to set up, nothing to pack down, no room to drive to. I could hold the whole practice in one hand and work on a piece anywhere — a corner of the kitchen, the end of the couch, ten minutes before the day began. After years of trades where the setup alone could eat an hour, this felt like getting away with something.
The first things I made had no plan behind them. The Playful Line was one of them. Five golden kittens — really the same small body caught again and again mid-tumble. Rolling. Batting at nothing. Flopping over. Then sitting up as if it had meant to do that all along. There's no story in it and no lesson. Just a run of small movements that made me happy to draw.
I nearly didn't keep it. It felt too light. Nothing in my life up to then had rewarded lightness — precision was rewarded, patience was rewarded, getting a thing exactly right was rewarded. A row of playing kittens didn't belong on the same shelf as all that. But it was the truest thing I'd drawn in years. So I laid a bold pink line under it and left it in.
That line turned out to be the whole point.
From the studio — The Playful Line, available as paper, wood, and framed.
For most of my life, everything I did had to produce something. A haircut had to land. A part had to hold to the thousandth of a millimetre. Every hour was measured by what came out the far end of it. I was good at that life, and I'm not knocking it — the discipline it built is the same discipline that lets me lay ten thousand hatch marks into a piece without the line wandering. But a life that only ever produces has no slack in it. And a person with no slack goes stiff without noticing.
The kittens don't produce anything. They roll because rolling feels good. They fall because falling is part of playing. Not one of them is trying to get somewhere. Drawing them, I saw that I'd spent forty years treating play as the reward you collect once the work is done — a treat you earn. I had the order backwards. Play isn't what's left over after the work. It's what keeps the worker loose enough to do the work well.
So now I guard it. I play guitar — not well, very happily, for no one. I make things by hand at the bench that nobody asked for and nobody will pay for. None of it produces a thing you could sell. All of it does exactly what the kittens do: it keeps the pink line drawn. On one side, the life that has to deliver. On the other, the hours that only have to be.
The work made me precise. The play keeps me loose enough to use it.
The three laws for keeping play in your life
I. Play is not the reward for the work. It is what keeps the work good.
For years I saved it for after — dessert once the plates were cleared. I had it wrong. The hour on the guitar, the afternoon at the bench, the kittens drawn for no reason — those are what keep me loose enough to sit down and do the careful work without going brittle. Remove them and the careful work is the first thing to suffer.
II. The pointless thing is often the truest thing.
The Playful Line almost didn't survive because it felt too small to matter. It's now one of the pieces closest to me. The thing you make with no plan, no market and no point tends to hold the most of you. Don't throw it out for being light.
III. Draw the line yourself — and defend both sides.
No one hands you permission to play. You draw the boundary and you guard it in both directions: you don't let the work bleed across it, and you don't let guilt talk you back over it. The line is yours to keep.
A credo to keep on your desk
Produce when it's time to produce. Play because you're alive.
01. I will stop treating play as the dessert I earn after the work.
02. I will keep the pointless things — the guitar, the bench, the drawings with no plan.
03. I will let precision serve the work, and let play serve me.
04. I will draw my own line, and guard both sides of it.
05. I will remember the lightest thing I made might be the truest.
06. I will fall, roll, and play — and still find my feet.
Fall. Roll. Play. Find your feet, and begin again.
— Paschar
Follow the slow build — @paschar.art
Process clips, the quiet hours behind a piece, and the unhurried play that keeps them going — like the litter in this one. One post for every long week at the studio.