Last year’s Farnborough Air Show resulted in the successful recruitment of a company to Kansas, he said, but the details have not yet been announced.
“The industry is on the upswing,” Brownback said. “Wichita is on the upswing. It’s a good time to be going.”
In Kansas, 30,000 people are employed in the avaiation industry, and it’s home to 200 suppliers.
“I think our integrated position is more competitive than anybody in the world,” Brownback said. “The entire structure is here. There’s no place else in the world that has that. We have to go sell that.”
Brownback touted changes to the state’s tax structure, which he said has helped improve the business climate.
“With our improved business environment, skilled workforce and strong economic development tools, Kansas is an attractive place for aviation and aviation-related companies to expand,” Brownback said.
“It’s one more opportunity to demonstrate how important aviation is to our market and how much experience we bring to international companies,” Nolan of the GWEDC said.
Many of the suppliers have some great contacts, but they don’t always have the opportunity to meet with them face to face, Nolan said. The Paris Air Show gives them that chance.
Live flowers have a lot going for them. Even the most common example can strike you as a natural, inherently beautiful work of art, whomever or whatever you may credit for creating it. Pictures of flowers, on the other hand, can be intriguing for what they reveal about human intellectual history.
Consider a page from “A Selection of Hexandrian Plants Belonging to the Natural Orders of Amaryllidae and Liliacae,” by Priscilla Susan Falkner Bury, a briefcase-size volume published in England in 1831-34. The book’s intensely colored engravings, based on drawings from life by the self-taught Bury, describe various amaryllis, hemerocallis and lily species with exacting linear precision. Divorced from any backgrounds, the plants stand out starkly on the white paper.
The image on view here shows a profusion of white blossoms, each with six papery petals and six yellow stamens bursting from a central tubular stalk. A long green leaf finely textured by parallel lines shoots up in the background, its darkness enhancing the dimensionality of the brighter flowers and stem. Another leaf entering from the right and circling up and around the central flowers seems animated by a loving, protective impulse. Two butterflies with vividly patterned wings frozen in flight are like angels worshiping a floral divinity.
Bury’s image tells enough about this particular species that you could identify one if you encountered it in the wild. But the flower is also considerably abstracted in her rendering. There is little sense of natural light, for example. It’s rather a schematic cartoon designed to reveal the plant’s definitive structures. Unlike the Impressionists, who several decades later would try to paint how flowers are visually perceived — blurry, in a word — Bury wanted to depict real things as they can objectively be understood.
In an essay in the exhibition catalog, Leslie K. Overstreet, curator of rare natural-history books at the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, outlines a broad historical context for the sort of thing that Bury and most of the other artists in the exhibition were doing. From the time of Aristotle to the fall of the Roman Empire, botanical research and discovery went on much as they did in Bury’s day. But the decline of the Romans was followed by a millennium in which scientific studies mostly languished in Europe. Then came the Renaissance and the rediscovery of antique scientific texts, many of which had been preserved and translated by Islamic scholars, and a vibrant new era of research began.
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