EDSEL MOSCOSO, who became the favorite of art collectors for his sepia-tinted figurative renditions of Filipino rural folk, died of leukemia on Dec. 21 and was buried last week in his hometown of San José, Antique over the weekend. He was 55.

According to his friend, writer Corito Llamas, Moscoso had been diagnosed with leukemia in 2007, turned down a bone-marrow transplant and tried, instead, alternative medicine.

He was last seen publicly at the University of the Philippines in Diliman, Quezon City, when he was among alumni artists to be given the UP Centennial Awards. Wheelchair-bound, he personally received the award and was happy about the honor, Llamas said.

Moscoso had received acclaim even during his college days at UP Fine Arts. In 1975, he was named one of the 13 Outstanding Young Artists by the Art Association of the Philippines.

In UP, his teachers were Anastacio Caedo, Napoleon Abueva, José Joya, Ed Castril lo, Rod Paras-Perez and Virginia Flor Agbayani.

In the late 1970s, Nick Joaquin, in his article about ?a new direction in Philippine art,? christened Moscoso?s representational evocations of Philippine rustic life in caramel colors as ?manscapes.?

It is in his manscapes that Moscoso achieved his greatest artistic success, allowing him to exhibit and to get collectors for his works here and abroad.

Obsession

?People have always been my obsession,? he wrote. ?It is and always will be pivotal to my form of art... In my involvement with creating human form, I have always strived to create figures using the purest of lines, never repeating them to create a linearity of purpose.

?It is this obsession that has spurred me to simplify my art to its maximum purity of execution, a result of years of valid rendition in drawing the purest of human figures, using only the most minimum of lines to delineate the figures and their accessories, my different canvases unreeling in the process the vast panorama of the Filipino people ever at work or at play, intent in fulfilling their many different activities.?

Moscoso later turned to ?godscapes,? which are renditions of the pantheon of the Gods in the Hellenic and Judeao-Christian worlds.

His later classical works largely owed to his European training. He took up art studies at the Academia di Belle Arti de Roma. He also studied fresco restoration at the International Center for the Study and Preservation of Cultural Properties, also in Rome, under an Italian government scholarship.

In 1986, Moscoso graduated summa cum laude from the Ponitifico Instituto di Archelogia Cristiana in Rome.

His studies in Rome, particularly his studies on Christian archeology, made him rediscover his Christian heritage.

Christian heritage

?This decision proved quite a revelation,? he wrote. ?It opened a greater understanding of our kind of religion, for the study encompassed various fields of discipline, from the early teachings of the Church fathers to iconography, epigraphy and the development of ecclesiastical architecture.?

Moscoso added his Catholic archeological studies made him rediscover Filipino religiosity.

?The understanding prodded me to use my art in coming out with native forms to address our kind of religiosity as a people,? he explained. ?To use the local provincial folk to represent the divinities was to reach out, to Filipinize our religious sensibility.

?From this preoccupation was born a series of paintings glorifying the Philippine rural folk as simple country people with saintly orbs imparting a certain divinity to them.?

At the time of the discovery of his cancer, Moscoso was renovating his mother?s house into a museum containing his collection of artworks and memorabilia.

Llamas said she suspected Moscoso got the cancer for his ?workaholic? ways. She explained he often would skip meals when working on his canvases or supervising the renovations. At one time, she said she saw him faint because he had not been eating.

?The house is beautiful,? Llamas said about the complex Moscoso built. ?But the trade there was his health.?

?He was an artist,? Llamas added. ?He would not compromise perfection.?

A bachelor all his life, Moscoso would have turned 56 on Jan. 30, 2009.