Sandro Kopp: plush-toy portraitist (original) (raw)

I have never sat for a painted portrait. But the companion of my childhood – my avatar, my confidant, my hero, my utterly reliable friend – has. This is Wol, my owl, beloved almost to destruction.

The painter responsible is Sandro Kopp, who, for the past months, has been working on a series of portraits of passionately loved soft toys of childhood. It began with the illness of a family member. When his stepdaughter, Honor, couldn't visit the bedside herself, she would ask her mother, Tilda Swinton, to take her toy Liony, as a way of conveying her love, and maybe a little bit of herself, too. (Honor's Liony is a curious creature whose once-lavish mane went a bit funny after a stint in the dryer.) It was a tough period, says Kopp: "I found that painting people, as I usually do, just seemed too much." So he painted Liony and called the work Ambassador because of the way she (yes, despite the mane) had been sent back and forth. Perhaps on some level Kopp was in need of some of the silent comfort these animals can offer.

He originally had no thoughts of making a series of works, but Liony's picture elicited a strong response from people who saw it – it stirred memories of other familiar creatures, who may have been set aside by their owners but were never quite thrown away. Other sitters followed. An old friend sent the artist an adored teddy bear. Kopp himself found his own Goully, a monkey. Then a koala, a piglet, an elephant with a tusk dangling by a few loosening stitches – in short, a motley and battered crew of survivors, including Wol – began to arrive in Jiffy bags at Kopp's studio in Nairn in the north-east of Scotland. He was intrigued by how much each toy carried with it the presence of its owner. He uses a German word, Stellvertreter, which means proxy or representative, to describe this sense. (Kopp was born and raised in Heidelberg.)

Kopp has given most of the toys a grandiose landscape background, often borrowed from an old master. Some even have a faintly religious air, perhaps a trace of the complete emotional faith that we put into these objects as tiny children: Piglet, for example, floats upwards with the landscape of Raphael's Transfiguration behind him. Wol himself has a Caspar David Friedrich moonrise at his back, appropriate for his old role as nocturnal protector. I find it strangely moving to see him made so heroic.

Looking at these animals – which go on show today in an exhibition called Fiercely Loved – fills me with memories of my own relationship with this now-battered collection of stuffing and fabric. He was given to me by one of my elder brothers, and, through some mysterious process, chosen to be the toy favoured above all others. Wol understood all and forgave all, listened to everything, and kept me safe in the dark. My mother repeatedly repatched his eyes, his beak and claws with felt. I can feel her loving presence in the stitches, or at least what remains of them. (Somehow it is important that other family members respect the role of the favourite toy.)

There is at least one dramatic family story concerning Wol. My father remembers it better than I: "We were driving towards Ciudad Rodrigo from the Portuguese border. You were sitting in the back, aged about four, with the window open when, a propos of nothing, you suddenly announced that Wol had fallen out. (Did he fall or was he pushed?). As you know, I share with Lot a reluctance to look back, still less to turn back, but I did. We found Wol quite unharmed several miles back."

These abandonment events seem to crowd round holidays. Kopp was unluckier than I. When, as a child he held a toy rabbit up to the open car window to "get some fresh air", it was all over – for the family was driving along a Swiss motorway. Psychoanalysts would argue that these abandonment episodes are important: the child does it because, at some level, he or she can. They are moments when the act of separation from the parent is practised. Dad may have hit the nail on the head when he gently wondered (terrible thought) whether Wol was pushed.

I'm grateful for his rescue, though. He may no longer be central to my life; he may live in a drawer rather than next to my pillow. But I'm very glad he's still there – and now immortalised in paint.