Family Hike

Aaron Piland and Ayumi Kajikawa Piland are the fantastical magical duo known as APAK. They are a child-like husband and wife art team who live among the fury conifer giants in a little cottage on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon. They create artwork together as a way exploring the beauty, mystery, and magic of life as well as expressing their love for life and each other. They are known in particular for creating rich and colorful gouache/acrylic paintings on wood featuring the utopian lives and adventures of curious little beings living in lush fantastic environments surrounded by friendly little animals. It is their goal to bring something fresh, beautiful, and meaningful into the world in hopes of inspiring the next generation to live simply, peacefully, and in harmony with nature and each other. Welcome to their world, please enjoy your visit! Giclée (pronounced "zhee-clay") is a neologism for the process of making fine art prints from a digital source using ink-jet printing. The word "giclée" is derived from the French language word "le gicleur" meaning "nozzle", or more specifically "gicler" meaning "to squirt, spurt, or spray". It was coined in 1991 by Jack Duganne, a printmaker working in the field, to represent any inkjet-based digital print used as fine art. The intent of that name was to distinguish commonly known industrial "Iris proofs" from the type of fine art prints artists were producing on those same types of printers. The name was originally applied to fine art prints created on Iris printers in a process invented in the early 1990s but has since come to mean any high quality ink-jet print and is often used in galleries and print shops to denote such prints.