My daughter likes Central Cee. That was the starting point. I wanted to make something for her, and at first I thought it would be a portrait of an artist she listens to. A face, an identity, perhaps a little of the visual language surrounding his music.
Then I read an interview that changed what I wanted to draw.
In a November 2024 British GQ profile by Robert Kazandjian, Central Cee recalled getting on the number 94 bus at Goldhawk Road when he was younger. He described riding upstairs through Holland Park, looking out at a different side of London, and sometimes travelling back and forth without getting off. It was a small detail in a much larger story about music, success, friends and the distance between where you start and where you imagine going.
But it was the detail I couldn't stop thinking about.
A teenager sitting on a bus. The city moving around him. A window between the world he knows and the one he's beginning to picture.
That became THE 94.
01 / The Reflection
The first image is about time.
Central Cee's face occupies the window, not quite inside the bus and not quite outside it. His features are interrupted by reflections, passing light and the fine damage of weathered glass. Behind him, a younger figure sits alone and looks towards the street. The two figures never meet, but the image asks you to hold them in the same moment.
This is not an attempt to recreate a photograph from his teenage years. The scene is deliberately imagined. The older face is a reflection from a possible future; the passenger belongs to the journey that came before it.
The red 94 gives the two halves a common anchor. It began as a literal bus number and gradually became the architecture of the artwork. I wanted the lettering to feel as though it had been found in the city, shaped by transport graphics and the energy of street writing, rather than added as a conventional title beneath a portrait.
Early versions were louder. Multiple faces, heavy distress, aggressive lettering and familiar London signals all competed to say what kind of image this was. They looked like music posters. They didn't yet tell the story.
The work improved as those signals disappeared. The face became quieter. The bus window started to matter. The younger passenger became visible without becoming the headline. The number stayed.
02 / The View
The second image began with a question: what happens if the person is no longer the most important thing in the frame?
I moved the composition into a landscape format and looked outward from the upper deck. The bus interior became a frame. The terraces, shopfronts, streetlights, traffic and wet pavement began to carry the weight of the image. A passenger remained at the left edge, small enough to be part of the journey rather than its subject.
For a while, I tried to keep a faint reflection of Central Cee in the glass. It seemed like the logical connection between the two artworks. But each attempt made the city less convincing. The face was either too clear, turning the picture back into a portrait, or so indistinct that it felt like an accidental apparition.
Eventually, I removed it.
That was the decision that resolved the piece. The architecture could breathe. The line of the street could carry the eye into the distance. A second red bus, marked 94, gave the journey its identity without requiring a title, route map or explanatory caption inside the image.
The two images now express the same idea in opposite directions. One looks at the person and imagines the city reflected through him. The other looks at the city and leaves us to imagine the person watching it.
Drawing the idea, not just the subject
The study brings together Twain's work in portraiture, lettering and architectural illustration. The people, graphite tones and composition establish the story. Street-derived marks and abrasion add texture, reduced through revision until they belong to the environment. The numeral and name are treated as drawn architecture, giving the lettering a role within the image. In the landscape, the focus shifts to viewpoint, urban depth, repeated façades and street rhythm, and to the relationship between the passenger and the city.
The final artworks are digital illustrations developed through multiple visual studies and revisions. Their pencil and graphite language gives texture, tone and drawn marks a central role in each composition. The landscape is an interpretation rather than a surveyed or geographically exact reconstruction of the 94 route. It is an interpretive West London streetscape inspired by the account in GQ. The rain, reflections and particular arrangement of buildings are artistic choices, not documented facts about his journeys.
I think that distinction matters. The interview gave the project its factual starting point. The drawings explore what that starting point might feel like.
Two views, one journey
Looking back, my favourite change wasn't a new technique. It was the decision to take something away.
The portrait needed the young passenger to make its story clear. The city study needed the portrait to disappear. In one, identity fills the frame; in the other, identity is carried by a view, a seat and a number on a bus.
I began this because my daughter likes Central Cee. I ended up making two images about a more ordinary, and maybe more familiar, experience: looking out of a window and wondering what else might be possible.
Sometimes the journey begins before you go anywhere.
Source and artwork note
The narrative inspiration is Robert Kazandjian, “Central Cee is built to last,” British GQ, 14 November 2024. The bus anecdote is drawn from that interview; the depicted people, weather, architecture and reflections are illustrative interpretations. Independent, unofficial artwork; no affiliation with Central Cee, his representatives, Transport for London or British GQ is implied.
Artwork and creative direction: Twain / MFCMF · THE 94 series · October 2026.
