I broke my arm two weeks ago. At first I thought I couldn’t write this review. I was sad. Partly I was sad because I like writing. Mostly I was sad because I like Roy McMakin. Ever since first writing about his work two years ago, I’ve been a little bit of a McMakin fan club president, and so I thought, after just being sad for a while, “What would Roy McMakin do?”

McMakin would make everything somehow okay, and he would find a way to write this review. Scratch that. He would find a way to communicate what he wanted to communicate. I’m telling this review to my friend Danielle, who I don’t know very well. It feels very intimate and all of a sudden. The thing is, Roy knows a lot about intimacy, and all of a sudden.

McMakin is an artist who happens to create objects that take the form of furniture and houses. His work is at once ephemeral and grounded, heavy and ethereal, emotional and intellectual. From his Slat Back Chair to his installation Lequita Fay Melvin, a collection of objects named after his mother, from a house he designed for two Seattle-based art collectors, to the Western Bridge gallery space in that city’s industrial neighborhood, Roy’s work is consistently tactile, thought provoking and transformative.

I didn’t know all of this the first time I saw Roy’s work. I had been sent on assignment by Wallpaper magazine from New York to Seattle, and all I knew was that I was there to see a house. The photographer and I drove from Tacoma to Lake Washington and spent a couple of hours in the house before Roy got there to talk about it. I spent time looking at the perfect detail work, the impossibly smooth surfaces, the stairway that seemed to hover despite looking like it weighed one-hundred thousand pounds. As I had learned to do over the course of similar assignments the years before, I walked through the house, following its figure eights of circulation and trying to figure out just what the angle of curvature truly was. I went outside, looked back at the picture windows and thought really, really hard about what this house could mean.

I was suffering from labyrinthitis at the time. I had been dizzy for a couple of weeks. Friends had encouraged me not to fly to Seattle, fearing some grave inner-ear disorder that would surely be made worse by some thirty-five thousand foot elevation. My career came before everything, so of course I came. On the transcript of our interview, I can hear myself trying at first to be incredibly professional, to keep the conversation focused on Roy’s identity as an artist or an architect, it’s all so confusing. And then I hear myself just telling him what’s going on. I’ve been lucky enough to be able to spend the last few years telling Roy what’s going on. Because the thing — one of the many great things — about Roy is that you really can’t fake him out.

McMakin’s work gets to the core of the human condition. I didn’t realize that I had a human condition before I met Roy, but the more time I spent looking at projects like Untitled (A Small Chest of Drawers With One Drawer That Doesn’t Fit) or Love and Loss, his installation at the Seattle Olympic sculpture park, the more I realized that McMakin tends to manifest physically what I — and all others who experience this human condition — feel emotionally.

As McMakin tells art writer Michael Ned Holte in the latter’s essay appearing in the recently published monograph, Roy McMakin: When is a chair not a chair? (Rizzoli), “My job is to create meaningful objects.” Ned Holte describes McMakin’s Maple Chest, dissecting the seemingly straightforward piece of furniture for the eccentric, intensely intimate piece of art that it is. “The straightforward title belies the eccentricity of the work’s details, which reveal themselves in time,” he writes. “The side panels are partially open, exposing several drawers; the front legs are strangely curvy and tapered; the spherical pulls are spaced differently on each drawer; and — most unnervingly — an avocado shaped depression is located centrally on the only drawer with no pulls. The depression is at the same height as the solar plexus of McMakin’s lover at the time, playing with a double meaning of the word chest and lending the piece of furniture provocative bodily presence.” It reminds me of the first time I saw McMakin’s Self-Portrait with Jim which appears on the title page of the monograph. On the right, a perfectly rendered representation of a handsome mustachioed man; on the left, a delicate wooden chair whose bent arms circle from back to seat, open for embrace. It’s not that Roy thinks he is a chair that makes this piece so compelling; it’s that Roy is able to see how easily our furniture operates as both an extension of ourselves and as a prescriptive object. I’ve spent a lot of time with Roy since that weekend two years ago, and we’ve always circled around the same question: How does he do what he does? McMakin flirts with answering this question in a six-paragraph essay, which appears facing an almost imperceptibly curved table. “Today, I make paintings, houses, chairs, sculptures, tables, photographs, drawings, vases, chests of drawers and juice glasses. These endeavors require the creativity of the artist as well as the pragmatism of the design professional and small businessman.”

“I see the job of an artist as that of a philosopher of visual experience. I am interested in how meaning is contained within objects and how I can illustrate and manipulate that meaning. I am interested in how memory, familiarity, scale, craft and functionality factor into this investigation. I am interested in how emotionality becomes perceptible.”

That untitled chest of drawers, the one with that misshapen drawer that doesn’t quite fit, is an example of McMakin’s perceptible emotionality. It is functional and, therefore, can be classified as a design object, as can most of McMakin’s work. But it is the immediate sense of longing, isolation and memories of traumatic lunches in the high school cafeteria that seeing this drawer, almost the same size as the others but not quite, elicits. The thing that makes Roy so brilliant is that his furniture not only expresses that formerly ineffable sense, but immediately soothes, holds and convinces you that everything is going to be all right.

Flipping through McMakin’s monograph is a look into a mind that is at once meticulous and expressive, sharp edged and enveloping. His titles alone, like A Slightly Not Round Tea Table, produced in 2005, or Would Table, or A Door Meant as Adornment, the title of a solo show at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, offer a linguistic expression of the artist’s wide-ranging playfulness. Some could read in this seemingly effortless wordplay the type of compensation frequently used by smart and self-aware people as a way of deflecting any talk of pain. And it is here, in this constant push and pull between pain and comfort, mourning and excitement, and, to borrow a phrase from the artist himself, love and loss, that the crux of what makes McMakin truly an artist, rather then a deeply meaningful furniture maker, lies. It is because of McMakin’s work that I understand that my arm will not always be broken. And it is because of Roy that I know it’s OK.