Sandro Kopp paints a portrait of life with Tilda Swinton

Sandro Kopp in London, October 2010
Lydia Slater10 April 2012

Artist Sandro Kopp is meeting me to discuss an exhibition of portraits he's painted over Skype. Alas, the Tube is having a temperamental morning and by the time I have struggled across town to the River Café, I'm wishing we could have done the interview over Skype, too. But there is something de-stressing about Sandro. It's not just the bushy beard and inscrutable features that give him the aura of a mystic monk, it's the calm that he projects, even in the midst of a gang of waiters noisily setting up lunch.

This calm is all the more impressive when I learn that Sandro is in a comparative panic ('a wee bit worried,' is how he puts it). His show is about to open in Paris, but the strikes mean that, when we meet, only a third of the paintings have arrived at the gallery. 'This kind of thing happens and you just have to deal with it when it comes your way,' he concludes in his soft, slow New Zealand accent. 'I'm a positive person. I have a hopeful, possibly stupid belief in stuff working out.'

Sandro, 32, is the long-term partner of actress Tilda Swinton, 49, and I am willing to bet that this Zen quality is part of his appeal (although, of course, he's very handsome as well, with olive skin, aquiline features and heavy-lidded, slanting eyes). If I were a jet-setting Oscar winner, I'd want Sandro in my retinue, too, just to keep my feet on the ground. 'My sweetheart travels a lot and if I didn't travel with her I wouldn't get to see as much of her as I would like,' he says with a grin. 'We've found a rhythm that works for us where I can be very productive, no matter where we are.' A third of his suitcase is taken up with a mobile studio comprising a folding easel, palette, paints and brushes, and while Tilda is on set, he gets on with his art.

It was this peripatetic lifestyle that first gave Sandro the idea for his Skype paintings. He has been working on a series of paintings of his friend Waris Ahluwalia, the exotically gorgeous New York-based Sikh jeweller and party fixture, who was oddly mesmeric as the train guard in The Darjeeling Limited, Wes Anderson's Indian road movie. 'He's amazing- looking with his long eyelashes and nose,' rhapsodises Sandro, explaining how one of Waris's eyelids catches the light in a particular way that he finds irresistible. 'We joke about the fact that between the turban and the beard, there's not really much left that I have to paint,' he laughs. Because the pair both travel so extensively, sittings are not always easy to arrange. 'And then he was in Istanbul and I was at home, so we said, "Let's do it on Skype." '

The pixelations and screen distortions that Sandro faithfully recorded in his portrait gave rise to an entirely different kind of painting. 'I sat with that idea for a couple of months, and then I thought, "This is really something I want to do," ' he says. 'I love classical painting, but it's very difficult to put it into a contemporary context. This is a way of using something very, very now – within five years, you probably won't have that kind of interference on Skype – and chronicling that moment is a very good thing. It encapsulates everything I like about painting from life but it's completely different.'

He started painting the series, entitled Not A Still Frame (Hybrid) in April in Connecticut, where Tilda was filming We Need to Talk About Kevin. While she took on the role of the guilt-ridden mother of a psychopathic schoolboy in an adaptation of Lionel Shriver's bestselling book, Sandro's sitters posed for him in their homes around the world. He flips open his laptop to show me the portraits: there is his computer programmer brother Vinai (who lives near Heidelberg), next to the Ugly Betty star America Ferrera, who posed in New York; Sandro's great friend, the German actor Thomas Kretschmann (King Kong, The Pianist), sitting in Berlin; singer-songwriter Beth Orton in London, a jewellery designer in Paris and various friends in New Zealand. Some of the images are as crisp as if the model had been in the same room, while others are heavily pixelated, which Sandro prefers. 'There have been moments when I've put on YouTube at the same time and downloaded stuff to see if I could get a bit more interference,' he confesses. 'The pixelation adds an element of 3-D.'

But there is only one portrait of Tilda in the exhibition, painted while she was at home in Nairn, and he was in Germany. This is rather disappointing: after all, Tilda is not only his lover, she also possesses the kind of dramatic looks and bone structure that should have painters falling to their knees in rapture. And she's obviously no slouch at holding a pose either – witness her extraordinary feat in 1995, when she lay in a glass case for days at the Serpentine Gallery as part of an artwork, The Maybe, by Cornelia Parker.

'I do like to paint Tilda very much but she's one of the busiest people I know, so when we have time together and we could be painting, we'd rather be chilling out,' says Sandro. 'I have done maybe ten or so paintings of her. When I was in Germany and she was at home, she sat for me there, and I'm going to Florida so we've arranged some Skype dates then. She's super-stunning to paint. I think there will be more over the years.'

Sandro was born in Heidelberg and grew up in a village nearby. 'I'm a country bumpkin,' he says. His father, Hermann Kopp, was an architect; his New Zealand-born mother Kayla was a lecturer in English at the university. They separated when he was small and although the family remained in Germany, Sandro lived with his mother – hence his accent. Both parents supported their younger son's artistic aspirations. Kayla put on Sandro's first solo exhibition at the Skill Institute, a local tertiary learning facility. He was six years old and the exhibition featured a good many animals and dinosaurs.

But it wasn't just his mother who spotted his talent. 'My art teacher put on a solo exhibition of my work when I was 14 or 15,' he recalls. 'It was amazing, when I think back on it. He stayed after school to help me hang it. I totally didn't get it, I was just annoyed at having to stay behind.' After he'd completed his compulsory national service, helping out at a holiday centre for ADD children, he moved to New Zealand, wanting to get closer to his maternal roots.

There he attended The Learning Connexion, an alternative art school in Wellington, which he describes as 'strange but kind of great'. Naturally, he also got involved in The Lord of the Rings, although he says he never
wanted to be an actor. 'It was such a huge
production and Wellington is a comparatively tiny place, it was almost impossible not to be involved in those films if you lived there. And I am a huge film fan and also a bit of a Lord of the Rings geek,' he confesses. 'The thing I really like is the community aspect of films. Painting can be very solitary and I'm not necessarily the type to sit by himself working away.'

He sketched production drawings, and moon-lighted as an uncredited Elf, Orc and Gondorian soldier. 'Elf was my favourite,' he says (not surprising: he does have an elfin quality). When, a couple of years later, the same crews were taken on to work on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, in which Tilda starred as the White Witch, he 'came along for the ride'. Once again, he was drawing, and also landed an extra's role as a Centaur 'with funny ears coming out of the side of my head and a wig'.

Just how he ended up catching the eye of the leading lady is not a topic he is comfortable discussing. 'We met at a party during the shoot,' is all he will say. Anyway, by early 2005, he was living with Tilda at her home in Nairn. The couple have worked together on screen since, on the 2008 film Julia, in which Tilda plays an alcoholic who kidnaps a child in an attempt to restore her finances. Sandro (with stick-on moustache) plays the child's hapless minder whom Tilda runs over twice in her car. Did that affect the relationship, I ask jokily. The iron curtain descends. 'No,' he says shortly. 'She's just my woman. The fact that she's pretending to be someone else doesn't affect the way I feel about her at all. It's all dressing up and pretending. It's very easy for me to have a laugh with her between takes.'

One can't blame Sandro for caginess on the subject of his love life. He's been bitten before. Last year, the couple had to sit out a prurient tabloid storm after Tilda appeared to declare in an interview that she and Sandro happily shared a house with her previous partner, the playwright and artist John Byrne (author of Tutti Frutti, the 1980s TV series about Scottish rockers that launched the careers of Robbie Coltrane and Emma Thompson). This was taken to mean that they had a ménage à trois. In fact, the portrayal of their domestic arrangements was as distorted by the media as one of Sandro's Skype pictures.

Byrne lives with his partner, stage lighting designer Janine Davies, in Edinburgh, but keeps a cottage in Nairn so he can see his and Tilda's twins, Xavier and Honor, 13, on a regular basis, which would seem to be good parenting, rather than cause for salacious gossip. Sandro describes Byrne as 'a wonderful dad', and declines to portray himself as occupying that paternal role. 'I'm very, very fond of them, they are very much family to me, but they have their dad.'

After our coffee, Sandro is heading straight back to Nairn – now under a carpet of snow – and is excited by the prospect. 'It's the pace of life,' he says. 'You get a sense that you're still in the 1940s up there.' The couple lead the McGood Life, tending their vegetable garden and striding the moors with their springer spaniels, heading off for bike rides and watching films. But what is Sandro's real idea of fun? 'Painting, painting, painting, painting, painting,' he says. In the evening, he closets himself in his studio, working on self-portraits when he can't lure a friend to sit for him in front of their computer screen. 'I don't really like painting myself, but I am my most reliable model,' he jokes.

Occasionally, he is prised away from this Highland idyll to strut a red carpet by Tilda's side. Does he enjoy the razzmatazz? 'I don't mind,' he says amiably. 'I mean, it is a bit odd, but then going to the dentist is odd, too. We're always doing odd things in our lives so it's not something I dwell on that much.' His life may be a little odd in parts, but Sandro Kopp strikes me as impressively well-adjusted.

Not A Still Frame (Hybrid) is at the
Brachfeld Gallery, 78 rue des Archives, Paris 3 (00 33 1 46 36 15 00), until 12 November

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