By Eric Brotman

As he sits in an Edmonds restaurant and lowers a glass of locally brewed beer from his lips, Semantics Gallery owner Larry Jeffers doesn’t take more than a moment to consider the twofold question just put to him about his experiences in running an art gallery and dealing with artists.

“The business is a can of worms,” he says. “The artists are all lunatics — including myself.”

Jeffers, now 67, hasn’t always led the lunatic life, at least not professionally.

Raised in Billings, Montana, he was exposed to the outdoors while deer hunting with his father. He developed an interest in rocks that he thought might eventually lead him to a career in geology. When his father moved the family to Denver, Jeffers took his 800-pound collection of rocks with him. “I wasn’t leaving without them,” he says.

In the early 1960s, he worked as a chemist for Angstrom Precision in Los Angeles, where he reluctantly learned the basics of welding. “I was scared of fire,” he recalls. “I didn’t want to light a torch.”

Several years later, while farming in Colorado with his father, Jeffers bought a torch, set up a little shop, and began to master welding. “The first metal sculptures I did were totally experimental,” he says. “I remember taking a 3-foot-tall piece into my father’s living room and hanging it on his brand new sheet rock wall. I said, ‘Dad, what do you think?’

“He said, ‘Well, you know, if you hung it sideways, you could call it A Train Wreck.’”

Two more years passed and Jeffers left the farm for Hollywood, Calif. There, he opened a shop and sold his first sculpture. It was the Train Wreck. “I sold it to a guy from Texas,” Jeffers says, “and the second that Train Wreck sold, I was in business.”

By the early 1970s, he’d moved to Lake Tahoe and was welding for Harvey’s casino. “I kept an eye on the slot machines,” he says. “I had to be there when there were big payoffs, to make sure the machines hadn’t been rigged. People would drill holes in slot machines and do all kinds of things.”

Jeffers soon left Lake Tahoe for Seattle. In 1975, he established a storefront in Pioneer Square, where he made “lots of belt buckles” with stones added. He quickly realized there was a market for pieces combining metals and minerals.

During the unusually hot Seattle summer of 1991, Jeffers planted a rooftop garden with dozens of hot pepper seed varieties he’d purchased through the mail from The Pepper Gal in Florida. The bumper crop set him and a partner down one of the most memorable byways of the many he has traveled.

“The Seattle Times did a big story on my garden, probably because the paper thought it was pretty amusing that some idiot in a Pioneer Square condo would start growing hot peppers. It was pretty impressive, all the different hot peppers, in different colors.”

Subscribing to Chili Pepper Magazine – The Zesty Life inspired him to try one of the published hot sauce recipes. “With a little modification,” he thought, “this could be interesting.”

He and his partner began producing a commercial hot sauce they called Prince of Peppers. After giving away samples of the sauce at a show in Tucson, Ariz., they had requests for the product from all over the world. But, by the early 1990s, the partners wearied of the business. “We didn’t care whether or not we saw another pepper as long as we lived,” Jeffers remembers.

Jeffers moved to Edmonds in 2004 and opened Semantics Gallery the following year. He found a space built in 1939 to house the medical practice of a Dr. Kinney. After Kinney left, dentists practiced in the building. Jeffers looks around the gallery and says, “Babies were born here and teeth were pulled.”

Initially, he intended to create and show only his own metal sculptures. But other artists, working in different media, persuaded him to show their work temporarily. “They hung their stuff up on the walls,” Jeffers says, “and the next thing I know, it’s selling.”

The turn of events changed his plans. “I couldn’t sit at my welding outfit and work, because the carbon from the acetylene torch would have wiped out their paintings. So, I transferred from doing welding to going into the art business,” he says, laughing.

Today, Jeffers considers himself experienced enough to “write a book” on how to operate an art gallery. He cites the enduringly dependable advice of Nicholas Kirsten, an early mentor, who told him, “Engage artists and pay attention to how long the conversation stays the same. If it deviates from the first things they’ve said—about what they do, where they live, where they came from—it will only get worse.”

“For example,” Jeffers says, “someone comes in and, early on, says he’s from Chicken Bristle, Kentucky, then says later he spent most of his time in Alaska. Eventually I learn he’s not really selling ‘wood carvings,’ he’s selling chainsaw totem poles.”

Still, the idiosyncrasies of artists and patrons haven’t prevented Jeffers from treating both parties well and supportively, based on the understanding he’s acquired over the past 40 years.

“I didn’t realize how sensitive all artists are about their own work,” he notes. “You have to be careful. You don’t want to rain on their parade and you don’t want to tell them something you can’t follow through on.

“I want customers and visitors to feel good about what they see in the gallery,” he adds, “and have an experience they want to tell their friends about and repeat. I’m not hard sell. I don’t want people to buy something, then go home and have buyer’s remorse.”

When asked, he lets people take home a painting to “try it out” before cashing their checks. They can return the artwork or keep it, as they wish.

Jeffers has many stories to tell and, when the gallery isn’t too busy, he has plenty of time to listen. He can be found at Semantics Gallery, 110 – 4th Ave. N., in Edmonds, Wednesdays through Mondays. On Father’s Day 2012, he anticipates opening a second location at 401 Main St.