Bridges 2010 Short Paper

“Matière” plays an important role in paintings to create an atmosphere to tableaux. We investigated “matière” or texture features of Paul Klee’s paintings because he seems to have tried to use many painting techniques and materials intending to produce variety of textures that create respective atmosphere in each painting. As a first step to know texture feature of color images of his paintings we analyzed grayscaled images of paintings in seven composition categories by 2-D wavelet transform. Then we calculate an image characteristic amount from the result of wavelet multi-resolution analysis of the painting images to clarify their texture feature quantitatively. As a result, the image characteristic amounts of painting images we calculated actually indicate that Klee created many different textures by using many kinds of painting techniques and materials. This result indicates that we can use the image characteristic amounts as objective index of texture feature or “matière” of paintings.