Candida Alvarez tries to make a conscious effort of experimenting with art.

She has incorporated rubber bands, cloth, thread and nails into her paintings, and now she is incorporating journalistic photography into them.

“I’m very interested in opening up the dialogue on what painting and drawing is,” Alvarez said. “The idea of cloth is like a drawing and the idea of using rubber bands is to add more color. I like being in the world and using stuff that is in the world.”

Alvarez said she does not want to limit herself to one way of creating art, and that is why she incorporates a variety of items into her paintings.

“I believe art is an active search and I don’t want to think that there are boundaries,” Alvarez said. “To say that I have a (certain) style means I have set up these parameters that I can’t cross.”

Alvarez spoke at the Tarble Arts Center on Wednesday in front of about 40 Eastern students and faculty.

She shared examples of her work, discussed what influences her paintings and explained her process of creating art.

“(Her speech) reinforced the whole idea that your influences can come from anywhere,” said Kyla Nance, a senior art major. “A lot of people don’t take that under consideration.”

Alvarez said that the memory of her mother’s Bible, which contained illustrations of the life of Christ, and coloring books influenced her paintings as an adult.

She said that the apartment complex where she grew up was also a major influence.

“There was something about the interior of that building and the fact that there was hundreds of people I did not know. I see that as a structural parallel to where my paintings evolved formally,” Alvarez said. “I was very interested in extending on how a painting can be made.”

She said the structural parts of that apartment complex paralleled how she created paintings.

“It was very systematic and it moved through sequencing,” she said. “(Painting) in some way has a relation to architecture: how it is built up from parts.”

Alvarez takes photos from several newspapers and creates paintings from them.

She said that her close relation to photography fueled the idea of taking photos from newspapers and creating them into paintings.

“I’m intrigued by participating in the world. By being open to it, those things come into my work,” Alvarez said. “My engagement with the times that I live in is very important to me.”