I took thirty eight paintings to Bedford at the weekend. It tok nearly seven hours to drive from hastings to Bedford ! But I had recovered by Sunday morning when I met Michael Croker, who is the head of the Art Department, at Bedford School.

The exhibition space was a surprise. It’s red, very red and I felt like a Foetus for a while.

Save for an occasional warm splash most of my colour is cool and so the red walls worked nicely against my canvasses. Michael really is used to the space and he and my team (my Marketing director, Technical director the driver) and I managed to hang thirty five paintings. I think they look good.

It isn’t an ideal exhibition space; it’s a thoroughfare, a busy crossroads and some of the shapes were curious, like these wedges under the stairs, but even these turned out to be opportunities rather than problems.

I like that idea that my work will be here for a month, largely ignored by the majority of five hundred schoolboys who will rush back and forwards past my paintings every day. Perhaps just one or two boys will stop and notice something.

There will surely be many boys at the school who will have played with the same plastic cowboys and Indians that I painted in my series of Playmobil tableau and I wonder what they will make of seeing their toys in this new context.

(Michael Croker and Russell Dorey on the morning of the hanging)