‘Back and Forth’ highlights creative similarities between artists and friends Jen Erickson and Kate Lund

It happens sometimes that after spending enough time with someone, a friend or co-worker, you begin to dress alike. You show up to the office only to find you’re both wearing stripes, or you meet for coffee and see your friend wearing a similar shade.

It’s a funny coincidence that seems to solidify a pair’s connection.

Artists Jen Erickson and Kate Lund have had several of those moments, only through their artwork.

In the four exhibitions they’ve shared, including “Back and Forth,” which runs through Feb. 28 at Terrain Gallery, Erickson and Lund have noticed similarities in their work.

It may not be obvious to an observer of “Back and Forth,” as many of Lund’s works feature true-to-life drawings of spiders and other insects, while Erickson’s pieces are more abstract. But after studying the exhibit as a whole and comparing Lund’s abstract works with Erickson’s, the exact same shade of blue is seen on both sides of the gallery, and Lund and Erickson use repetition in their abstract pieces, either of written word or rows of dots and lines.

“Whenever we would show together, there was always like, ‘Oh, we both used this color green or we both used this color pink,’ ” Lund said.

“This is actually the only show where we showed each other our work first, so previously, we would show up with work, and then it’s this weird thing that would happen where if I changed my color palette, so would Kate, and it would be in the same way,” Erickson said. “We’d be using different colors than we had before, but the same as each other. We’re like, ‘How does this keep happening?’ ”

The similarities extend beyond the art itself to elements of their artistic journeys, including that both only began taking art classes later in their adolescence, in high school for Lund and college for Erickson.

The pair met about 10 years ago after Lund was talking with Jeni Hegsted, founder and executive director of Emerge in Coeur d’Alene, after applying for a pop-up show at the gallery. Hegsted said Lund needed to meet a friend of hers, speaking about Erickson.

Neither remembers the very first time they met, and Erickson believes she “met” Lund’s work before she met the artist, but nevertheless, the pair clicked.

For each exhibition, the pair hasn’t talked about bringing a theme to their pieces, though they both draw inspiration from nature and see the similarities in their abstract works.

While the exhibition’s name seems a little combative, “Back and Forth” really does make sense. Lund and Erickson paid close attention to tiny details in their pieces, be it individual hairs on a tarantula’s legs in Lund’s “Nice to see you again” or row after row of small lines in Erickson’s “Paradigm.”

For Erickson, those small repetitions were partially inspired by a data entry job she held between undergraduate and graduate school in which she was making custom databases and coding and reorganizing information.

“I, in a weird way, created a need to keep doing really repetitive things that I never had before, which shows up in the work, but also for me, it was an interest in what happens to these memories that we forget about with this data,” she said. “Then this work for me is a marriage of what I used to do before grad school, this abstract color paintings, and then the repetitive stuff coming together in a way that teenager me and current me collaborated.”

Lund’s childhood connection to nature was amplified when she became a wildland firefighter in college, a job she held for eight summers. The job drove her to be more observant, from the insects she now draws to weather patterns.

Lund said she doesn’t usually have such direct imagery in her pieces, often using images of flowers and other natural elements, but she found the spider to be a “really effective symbol for having both good and bad qualities.”

“Studying nature and trying to be a student of nature was always something that was significant for me, so that’s a lot of where the drawing comes from,” she said. “The abstract pieces, the color comes from taking photos of the sky and using that as a starting point, and then I’ll use a repetitive layering of marks in there. Using text, I haven’t really done that in a long time, but that reappeared in this work, and I was excited about that.”

Which adds another similarity to the list, Lund and Erickson both brought back techniques they hadn’t used in several years for pieces in this show. At this point, they can’t help but laugh when a new connection is realized because with the way their creative minds work, they just can’t help it.

“We just have so much in common,” Lund said. “If our studios were side by side, I bet we would probably process the same way in the studio because we seem to think through things in a similar way.”