Freshman Zoey Conley-Mullis has been drawing since she was three years old, and for her it has become a form of catharsis. “It helps me with my emotions, like when I’m in a really bad mood, I’ll turn to art and it’ll help me channel that,” Conley-Mullis said. Photo by Katie Grace Upchurch
Update: The ODYSSEY Media Group will provide viewers with weekly stylized profiles that center on people in the Athens community telling their own stories.
By VALERIA GARCIA-POZO – News Editor
Freshman Zoey Conley-Mullis has a passion for art, which has developed over the years and become an outlet for her to express her emotions.
A blonde girl with a buzzcut. An energetic, outspoken demeanor. A notebook and a pencil to draw someone.
Her subject? A person once oppressed; standing tall, filled with joy, with the look of someone in the know of things hidden from the rest of the world.
She draws people with pride, as a way to defy the injustices they face when they step off her pages.
This is Zoey Conley-Mullis, and this is second nature for her. She feels; she creates.
She started drawing at the age of three — influenced by her father, an artist.
Her former house featured a wall dedicated to paintings of rainbows — her preferred subject, along with cats. As she got older, Zoey developed a cartoonish style of drawing that she describes as being akin to “a seven-year-old’s fan art”.
Then came the art block.
“I guess through that time where I wasn’t drawing anything, I was also acutely aware of the awful things going on in the world, like how women were being treated and how misogynists were shooting them down every opportunity they had,” Zoey said.
Artwork by freshman Zoey Conley-Mullis hangs on display in the hallway. Conley-Mullis enjoys drawing people empowered. “I draw them where I feel like they’re at their most–not necessarily most powerful, but you could look at them and be like, ‘Wow, that is a very powerful person,’” Conley-Mullis said. Photo courtesy of Zoey Conley-Mullis.
This period of not being able to pick up a pencil to draw and attacking every image she drew with criticism and doubt lasted for a year and a half.
For Zoey, it was hard to accept vindication from anyone else. It was her father who encouraged her to try art again — starting small, by just drawing squares.
Now, she’s found a way to express her feelings about the injustices she sees.
“If I’m really mad, I might play like a really fast song on the ukulele,” Zoey said. “Or, I’ll just take a pencil and scribble on the paper like really quickly. So I guess emotions play their way into both the music that I play and the art that I do. Most of the time it’s about ignorant people or dumb things that the media has said about someone or something like that.”
Art is a hobby-turned-emotional-catharsis, a way to express her anger, frustration and point of view.
