On The Road - Eau de Parfum

SMELLING NOTES

A Road Trip in Scent. On The Road is itinerant in nature. It begins with smoky notes of benzoin and birch reminiscent of the hot asphalt and grittiness of New York City. Punctuated by forays into tobacco filled bars where a new era in music is being defined by the Jazz greats, our journey takes us through the openness of the dusty cornfields of a Mid-Western America and rises to the cedar forests of a Pacific Coast. The restlessness of the journey finally gives way to the optimism left by the fresh green fragrance of galbanum, citrus and bergamot.

THE NOVEL

On the Road is a 1957 novel by American writer Jack Kerouac, based on the travels of Kerouac and his friends across the United States. It is considered a defining work of the postwar Beat and Counterculture generations, with its protagonists living life against a backdrop of jazz, poetry, and drug use. The novel is a roman à clef, with many key figures of the Beat movement, such as William S. Burroughs (Old Bull Lee), Allen Ginsberg (Carlo Marx), and Neal Cassady (Dean Moriarty) represented by characters in the book, including Kerouac, himself, as the narrator, Sal Paradise.

The idea for On the Road, Kerouac's second novel, was formed during the late 1940s, in a series of notebooks and then typed out, on a continuous reel of paper, during three weeks in April 1951. It was published by Viking Press in 1957.

The New York Times hailed the book's appearance as "the most beautifully executed, the clearest, and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac, himself, named years ago as 'beat,' and whose principal avatar he is."^[1] In 1998, the Modern Library ranked On the Road 55th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. The novel was chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.^[2]

THE ARTWORK / 11-20A

11-20A is a piece by Cedric Christie. On The Road features the photographs of the artist Cedric Christie. Shot on 35mm film while on a trip across the country, Christie captures the grit and hope of a modern America from the inner city to the open country. The photos provide a snapshot of the fragrance journey captured as art.

THE ARTIST

Cedric Christie lives and works in London. His work is a critical appraisal of colour and modernism as well as the exploration of the journey to form and meaning. His signature artworks, noted for their use of steel, scaffolding tube, snooker balls, cars, chalk lines, graphic text and the commercial fabrication process, have resulted in a string of solo shows and public art commissions both in the UK and internationally in Brussels, Antwerp and New York. Cedric's work is collected widely, notably in the collections of Anita Zabludowicz, David Roberts, Unilever, Derwent Valley Holdings and The University of Bedford.

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