Peavey Park

Peavey Park
Ink and graphite on paper
19” x 25”

I realized in the last couple years that I hadn’t drawn. I’ve painted, I’ve worked on murals, but I haven’t sat with paper and graphite for years and it hit me like a ton of bricks. This is how I connect with my dad, and this is how I’ve fallen out of connection to him. My dads a tricky one. He’s in the spirit world. He ran his life like a native Evil Knievel in a Terrence Malick film. While I’m sure he had great intentions to raise me well he lacked any understanding of how to. 

Peavey Park sat on a grassy hill overlooking neon arrows pointing right into the front doors of brightly lit liquor stores that smelled of freshly opened cardboard boxes. 

The Ave they called it; full of aunties and uncles I met for the first and last time, many times. Ice cold nights with fist fights in abandoned parking lots full of broken glass, they moved so fast I thought it was a disco.  Hanging with my dad on Franklin Ave, when I was seven, either ended up with blueberry buckwheat pancakes at Seward Cafe or on that grassy hill. I’ll never forget the smell of piss in those cinderblock bathrooms, it lives in my memory like the very first sip of booze with my dad’s friends. Passing the brown paper bag around in a circle teaching me the ways in which the Lakota shake hands, or “naaaaaah I’M Chippewa! We shake like THIS!”  

I sat for the first time in years to connect with my dad with paper and pencil and out came Peavey Park.

- Cheyenne Randall