This is a tribute to one of Penang's great master painters. Tan Choon Ghee captured his home city's scenes with ease and honoured urban landscapes throughout the world with an intense brush. He was born in Penang on January 25, 1930 and passed away at 70 on December 28, 2010.

FOR ALL HIS FAME and extraordinary skills, Tan Choon Ghee never got to be fabulously rich. Not that he minded that much, though once in 1980 he did publicly fulminate at the abject lack of art patronage.

Today, the paintings of Choon Ghee are much sought after, celebrated for the languid pearly washes of intriguing street life, quaint architectural façades and the more laidback harbourside scenes and rustic villages.

The gist is the sheer joie de vivre about the simple things that ordinary people love to do in public – eat, chat and loiter, shuffling around slo-mo like in a surreal movie, or merely taking a siesta in the open.

In the bubble-like freeze-frame of a manifest of life, there is invariably that sense of ceaseless rhythms, of lucid hues and contrasting shades, even when the subjects are stationary, seated or lying down. The obvious charm of his predominantly ultramarine-turquoise mix with doses of scarlet red is in his consummate manipulation of media, be it watercolours, ink and wash or oil.

And yes, the alacrity of strokes with deft gentle touches vivifying and embellishing whatever subjects. And yes, his sound and natural draughtsmanship – in detailing the Palladian lines of Straits Eclectic buildings or the more curvilinear and decadent Indo-Saracenic style like the Kuala Lumpur Railway Station building.

Romantic, lyrical and nostalgic – the emotions evoked come from a fi ne intricate blend between the old (world and cultural heritage) and the new (subtly, through modern signifi ers like telegraph poles and garish signboards); between Western aesthetics and Chinese brush tradition techniques – the seduction rites between sable brushes and a vulnerable, pliable white paper surface; between pure wet-on-wet dexterity and the plodding architectonic detailing.

What pure genius! The decisive, elusive moment – all reduced to the verve of blobs of sedate but pulsating colours, and an economy of lines.

In a 1988 interview, he told me: "The people won't be there for you to paint, not even for a minute. You see people, trees, buildings, cars at a glance. You see without focusing on anything. You don't see the details."

Choon Ghee, who often sported collar t-shirts and tinted spectacles, liked to paint the outdoors, with the sun beating down, creating intriguing shadows and myriad shades of colours.

"You have to be part and parcel of it to imbibe its moods, its ambience. Hot or cold, you are part of it, something which you can't get if you work in an airconditioned room," he said pointedly.

In his art, Choon Ghee is like a street magician, concocting an alchemy of colours to capture the poetry of street life.

His happy hunting ground was among pre-war buildings in Penang's old quarters, which were often in a state of disrepair, full of blemishes et al, and redolent with elements of a mixed heritage of the nation's youth.

Time and again, he would scour Love Lane – at the heart of the Cantonese quarters of artisans, roofers, masons and carpenters; the staid business fronts of Beach Street, the Weld Quay jettyside, and the rambling conurbations of Armenian Street, Cannon Street and Toh Aka Lane.

There are also the flamboyant clan houses such as the Leong San Tong (Khoo Kongsi) and heritage icon Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion, besides the clutch of religious sanctuaries like Kek Lok Si, Kwan Im Teng, Tua Pek Kong Temple, Kapitan Keling Mosque and the Nagore Jugah Shrine.

Choon Ghee has also become somewhat a patron saint of Penang street hawkers, depicting them plying their food in pushcarts or souped up tricycles by the roadside, some complete with makeshift canopies or tarpaulin roofs or under shady trees and with tables and chairs and often with a ubiquitous trishaw or two nearby.

The customers, often faceless and in squat postures, are shown enjoying their fill with pungent fumes and ornate. As he said in a 1992 interview: "I am always fascinated by old architecture. No two houses are the same in design and size."

The quaint gables of buildings along the labyrinth of canals in Amsterdam; the lilt and tilt of the gondolas in Venice with the hugely popular St Mark's Square; the Tower Bridge of London with its shroud of dreary, rheumy fog; the Singapore waterfront of old when skyscrapers were scarce, and the vignett es of other places he visited – in Australia, Austria, England, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Portugal and Spain.

His European building façades are so different from the baroque mix of Malaysian pre-war buildings with its louvred windows and panels, or the more Moorish topography of minarets, chhatris and domes in some buildings in Kuala Lumpur.

Some works were done with brevity of colours and quick lines – more true to the spirit of pure washes of say, the British master Sir Russell Flint. Others plumbed for more elaborate architectonic details such as those of the Penang City Council Building and the Renaissance-style Hong Kong Club which has since been torn down to make way for a 24-storey skyscraper.

One of his fondest memories was of his cruise on the Queen Elizabeth, which he recorded with great love. Indeed, in one of the kopitiam/café chit-chats around his Ayer Itam apartment, he mentioned a wish to go on such a journey again.

His ink and wash is another unique area, especially with the way he handled the broad nip to create barnacle-like splotches and fine lines of uneven and differing thickness on rice paper. Calligraphic colophons in Chinese written on the sides of his works would end with his trademark seal engraving.

In his works rarely are there not people. It was often the crowded thoroughfare or places that attracted people looking for spiritual succour or gastronomic delights that Choon Ghee was attracted to. He could do people in various postures and gestures easily, reflecting the rigorous regime of life drawings during his tutelage at the Slade School of Art in London.

Ironically, he loved to paint people as much as he loved to shun them, being a recluse by nature and a taciturn.

Despite growing up in the working-class Presgrave Street area, Choon Ghee started painting at the young age of 13. There were the inspirations of watercolour pioneers Yong Mun Sen (1896–1962) and Abdullah Ariff (1904–1960), but Choon Ghee was fortunate to have an early mentor in Kuo Juping (1908–1966).

Like Juping, he studied at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, in 1949–1951. The academy's founder cum principal, Lim Hak Tai (1893–1963), paid him (Choon Ghee) the highest compliment by buying one of his works.

A Second Prize for the watercolour section in an art competition organised by Peter Stuyvesant in Kuala Lumpur was another spur.

He continued his studies at the Slade School of Art in London from which he graduated in 1957. There, he came under taskmaster tutors such as Sir William Coldstream and William Townshend. One more art stint was in Germany in 1960, under a German exchange grant.

In between, he taught Art at various times at the Sekolah Sungai Ujong (1953), Han Chiang High School (1954–1955) and the Penang Chinese Girls' High School (1960–1962). He also set up an informal art school in Ayer Itam with (Datuk) Chuah Thean Teng and Lee Cheng Yong.

He seemed destined for a career in art until he made a dramatic career switch when he took up an appointment as chief set designer of Singapore Broadcasting Service (1962-1966) and later the Hong Kong Television Broadcasting. In between, he had a training stint with the Australian Broadcasting Commission in Sydney, in 1962–1963, under a Colombo Plan scholarship.

His stints in TV exposed him to design principles and storyboard illustrations and when he came back to Penang at the end of 1967, he surprised many including his siblings by going fulltime into painting, a most precarious profession as he found out much to his chagrin in the first few years.

Sometimes he could sell only two or three works throughout the whole year. He had to make do with giving art tuitions and doing the odd graphic design commission.

In the last two decades before his death, Choon Ghee stopped consigning his works to galleries because of tardy payments. Besides, because of his reclusive nature and his refusal to ingratiate himself with collectors, his clientele list was also comparatively limited.

While some newbie artists have the temerity to peg unrealistic prices for their works, Choon Ghee stuck to modest pricing throughout, until the last three years when he jacked up the prices of his works because of depleting stocks and failing eyesight.

"I'm in this for the long haul," he once explained about the reasonable pricing of his works, despite the exploitative nature in the secondary market.

Since stamping his mark in his first solo at the Hooi Ann Association organised by the Penang Art Society in 1956, Choon Ghee had never looked back.

He chalked up two "Retrospectives" to his name. The first was given by The Art Gallery (TAG) Penang in 1992, which was followed by the real big Retrospective 1957–2000, an honour accorded by the Penang State Art Gallery on June 5–30, 2000. In 1994, Ambassador Datuk Parameswaran, one of his collector acolytes, organised a mixed-work exhibition for Choon Ghee, dubbing it "Different Times, Different Places", at the Australian High Commission in Kuala Lumpur, from December 9-18. It greatly raised his profile there after a long hiatus.

TAG also held an exhibition called "Tan Choon Ghee Paints His Favourite Cities" in October 1993, and then hosted his "Seascapes" show in 1996. TAG gave him a Tribute show on January 2– February 28, 2001, and then under Art Salon@SENI, gave him another Tribute show on November 15– December 20, 2009, with some works newly sourced from the artist.

Choon Ghee has contributed so much in his art in capturing the heart and soul of Penang, uplifting what seems to be mundane things to a sublime plane and reinforcing the cheak beh theng (non-stopping eating) hawker culture that has become Penang's unmitigated cultural trait.

He has also inspired waves of wannabe Choon Ghees, while others such as Lee Weng Fatt , Lui Cheng Th ak, Jansen Chow, Khoo Cheang Jin, Chng Kah Khien, Chong Hon Fatt and Peter Liew have opened up new pages in the painting of local architectural heritage.

Despite the tough life as an artist, Choon Ghee persevered, and remained true to his art, never ever tempted to play to the gallery while sett ing stringent standards for himself.

"I have no regrets about becoming a fulltime artist. I'm happy I can make a living out of what I want to do. My wish is to be able to paint more, to continue painting and to be healthy and financially sound enough to see more places to paint. There are so many nice places," he confided to me in another interview in 2000.

His works of different places are paeans of the heart and memories, and reflect his philosophy of seizing life at its decisive moments: Carpe diem!

Ooi Kok Chuen has been writing on the art scene at home and abroad for 28 years.

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