Once upon a time, little Georgetowns flourished across the length and breadth of the British Empire, honoring the sovereign, King George. One of those Georgetowns was founded in 1786 off the northwest coast of the Malay Peninsula, on the island of Penang. Of Empire is my response to what remains of Britain's Malayan imperium in Penang.

Pulau Pinang (Beetlenut Isle) was acquired by the British from the Sultan of Kedah. Sir Francis Light picked the spot and arranged the cession. Soon thereafter he founded Georgetown on a flat triangle of jungle opposite the mainland. It soon grew from colonial beachhead into a cosmopolitan entrepot of Malays, Chinese, Indians, Thais, Armenians, Arabs and Europeans, trading goods from across Asia. From here, the British presence grew and evolved from commercial to imperial. Eventually,

Initially, Penang was administered as a Presidency of British India, ruled by the Governor General, Charles, Lord Cornwallis. This was the same Cornwallis who some years earlier had lead the British defeat in the American Revolution. When Sir Francis built a fort to defend his new town he named it after his boss. Fort Conrwallis remains there still, a low pile of stone walls surmounted by cannons:

Eventually, Penang became a British Crown Colony, a "Straits Settlement" like Malacca and Singapore. Georgetown grew into the most sophisticated city on the Peninsula, made rich from sales of Malayan tin and rubber, nutmeg, pepper and other commodities. The city glittered with the mansions of Chinese tin millionaires, government palaces, mosques, temples, churches, cricket pitches and street after street of arcaded, colonnaded, decorated brick and plaster shophouses.

Partisans dubbed the colony "The Pearl of the Orient" (a lustrous term Winston Churchill also applied to Britain's Uganda colony, "the Pearl of Africa"). Present day Malaysians liked the nickname so much that a few years back it became the state's official name: Pinang Mutiara Timor, "Penang Pearl of the Orient."

Today the luster is off the Pearl. Penang survived World War II largely unscathed, with one of the largest remaining collections of colonial-era buildings in all of Southeast Asia. After the end of the war, rent control held this trove in a kind of decaying suspended animation. Landlords were unwilling to invest. Few buildings were either kept up or torn down. They just slowly collapsed in the humid tropical heat. As urban renewal and land speculation pumped steroids into the skylines of other Southeast Asian cites, Georgetown remained sleepy and low-rise, even as the island's population density rose.

In 1999 rent control was lifted and the bulldozers set to work. The race was on between preservationists and developers. The former hoped to make Penang an UNESCO World Heritage Site, saving and renovating the old buildings. The latter wanted to start over. They envisioned another profitable, power-guzzling metropolis, like Malaysia's capital, Kuala Lumpur. That town's colonial and Chinese past has been consciously eradicated and replaced with a Brobdignagian forest of huge new buildings, including the world's tallest, the Petronas twin towers. It is a symbol of what Malaysia's government planners intend for the nation's future: Malaysia as high-tech capital of Southeast Asia.

Of Empire depicts Penang's final decades between1981 to 2000, when Georgetown's colonial-era buildings were in the last stages of decrepitude. I visited the island countless times during those years while studying, working and teaching in Malaysia. Subjects were painted sketchbook size, plein air or in the studio. I used various tones of sepia and India ink wash on paper, sometimes adding color accents in acrylic and gouache. Textural effects mimicking elemental processes - oxidation, leaching, corrosion and so on - were achieved with additions of salt, rice and other materials to the drying ink

In today's Georgetown, the developers are winning. Many of the structures I have painted no longer exist. The city is rapidly becoming a crowded modern metropolis of high-rises, multi-lane freeways, exclusive neighborhoods and evicted street people. Although the evidence of human activity is everywhere in my work, people are not. My subject is time, and its effects on humanity's continual, but ultimately fruitless efforts at architectural immortality.