It was the big arch in the former Joy Luck Chinese restaurant that wowed artist Max Grover.

He saw it first when he joined the Main Street Program walking tour of empty buildings last spring. Floor to ceiling, round as a nickel, spanning the whole space between the former dining room and the kitchen.

He decided to paint it turquoise, and as soon as he rented the space, he did just that.

He imagined bookcases, sun yellow and illuminated, halfway up the brick wall on the left side of the dining room as display cases for his new business partner, Holly Green. He did that, too.

Red, the third color in the Mexican folk art palette of turquoise, yellow and red, is splashed around and will be the primary color of the Day of the Dead shrine that will lean against the back wall, a place for mementos of lost friends, families and pets.

The colors repeat gloriously in a giant tin chicken the size of a large child, crowing on top of the bookcase, where it can’t give anyone tetanus.

Funny thing about that outrageous chicken: Green has one just like it that she bought while living in Petaluma, Calif., the “Chicken Capital of the World.”

Grover and Green have become business partners in a new joint venture: Grover’s new gallery and Green’s variety store. They are next to El Sarape Mexican Restaurant. Could this be any better for two people in love with Mexican folk art?

Sideshow Variety and Max Grover Gallery opens this Saturday, Oct. 1 at 630 Water St., with a ribbon cutting at 11 a.m. It will be open for Gallery Walk that evening.

Although Grover grew up in a family whose aesthetic he calls “beige world,” he became an avid collector of brightly colored and strange objects – and so has Green. When Swain’s Outdoor closed, for example, Green ran down to save the slushy machine, a mindset that Grover, whose house is dominated by collections, completely understands. He turned his own bathtub into a goldfish pond in his master bath, with a Mexican shrine behind it.

They met 18 months ago in Green’s evening clay class and hit it off immediately when Grover made an outrageous mermaid and one of his signature claw-foot bathtubs with big Mickey Mouse–hand faucets and a little detachable cat inside. Sizing up each other’s taste, they chatted about their favorite subject: junk stores.

“Picasso said that when art critics get together, they talk about form, content, intent and movements,” Grover said, “when artists get together they talk about where they got a good deal on turpentine.”

Green comes from a long line of collectors, and she recently brought to Port Townsend her grandfather’s stuff, including seven pianos, clowns, radios and cookie jars, and her dad’s collections – enough to fill a 27-foot truck and three storage units.

Green, like her dad, is a film buff and, coincidently, Grover made his living room a perpetually dark cave of a movie theater years ago. He estimates he watches about 400 films there a year and, at least once a week, chooses a film with explosions.

Green has seen most of them, too, and both are thrilled that the film festival moved some of its activity to their end of Water Street, in the Cotton Building, Pope Marine Park, American Legion and Northwest Maritime Center.

Another connection: Green worked in California for George Lucas (the George Lucas of “Star Wars” fame), and Grover, whose artistic awakening began in a San Francisco print shop, delivered work to George Lucas.

“See, all the stars aligned, and it couldn’t be stopped,” said Green.

So kismet or fate or good luck seems to play a role in this meeting, as in all meetings, and, if you go back far enough and look for patterns, they all lead to right now.

Ten years ago, after reading a Sunset article grandly titled “Working Harbor Towns of the West” and naming Trinidad, Newport, Port Townsend and Port Angeles, Green was drawn by the photographs and “jumped online” to research Port Townsend.

A former human resources director, she’s wired to trust her instincts. She met her husband, Matt, in Tahiti. Although they sailed off in different directions after their first meeting, they had a “radio romance,” switching CB channels frequently to lose the eavesdroppers. It was torrid talk, and they agreed to sail away together. So, when Matt and Holly found their way, finally, to Port Townsend, he fell in love when he saw the port’s 300-ton boat lift, and Holly cried when they rounded the curve on Sims Way and saw the sweeping view of the bay. “I completely lost it,” she said.

Within days, they found a house in Uptown, an area she had circled in yellow highlighter on the map before leaving California.

“When everything lines up, you get a choice whether to take it or not,” said Grover, listening to this tale. Grover wanted to have a presence once again on Water Street. Two years ago, he closed his gallery above the Imprint Bookstore, a few months before his wife and business partner, Sherry, died of breast cancer. When the gallery closed, 140 paintings sold, buying Grover time to work in his studio after Sherry’s death, uncommitted and without having to think about selling anything. Flinging one’s self into the abyss is a process all artists, writers, poets and dancers trust, even if it scares them.

A new look began to emerge. Grover had a new direction and “it was time to get back on track and focused.” A show of his new work on Bainbridge Island in August sold a heartening 23 of 35 paintings, confirming that opening a gallery, in spite of a recession, would be a positive thing to do, if for one’s own creative amusement rather than profit.

Green’s Sideshow Variety will handle gallery sales, as well as fairy wings, wigs and outrageous harlequin eyeglasses for the upcoming Kinetic Skulpture Race – plus a bewildering array of playful stuff that makes Lainie Johnson’s former gallery next door seem, in retrospect, tame.

And one more score: Green found one of those photo machines from the 1960s that spits out four flash pictures in a row. “All our family photos were taken in those machines,” said Green. “I have stacks of them.”

So, there is a place for the photo machine, one for live music and one for community art shows. Imagine building your own art portfolio, or multiple pictures of yourself in fairy wings, which fade over time to the sepia of Mexican photographs from the 1800s. And while kicking that around, Grover revealed that he’d love to build a Matador bar. “I know where I can find six bull’s heads in San Miguel,” he crowed.

It’s 7:30 p.m., and no one has had dinner. There’s a brief pause while visions of cowhide seats and black wrought iron hang in the air, but before the vision completes itself, we call it a day.