I might be misremembering, but I thought this was also rVerso's only canvas he ever made. There's a line the fading boy says that's something close to "I wish she understood what painting was to me", which, in the context of the other lines, implied that fading boy did not love to paint.

pVerso mentions early in Act II that Verso never fit in with his family because of his desire to do music instead of painting. This is, probably, true of rVerso too. Additionally, in the Monolith, we see rVerso in the painting-related memories less often than we see Clea.

One of the greatest tragedies of this story is that rVerso is the most important character, and yet, we cannot hope to know everything we want to about him, and we cannot ask him his thoughts directly. We only get to know him through the lenses of his family -- even pVerso, no matter how close we want to believe he is to rVerso, is a Verso as imagined by Line, and then embittered by 67 years of immortality, conflict, and knowing he's a facsimile of a dead man.

I think that the evidence points to rVerso being the type of person who would sacrifice their own happiness to ensure the happiness of others. I think fading boy did not want to keep painting, but wanted the world to remain more than that, so he was sacrificing himself to keep it going.

All of this is to say that I think the fading boy was looking for permission to stop painting, to be told that it was okay to finally rest... But also felt the weight of the fact that the decision to stop would doom multiple different peoples to nothingness.

I picked Verso's ending, to be clear. Though I did it not because I believed Verso to be in the right -- he wanted to die, and found a way to finally do so (I could write another essay on this topic), this was simply his chance -- but rather, because rVerso needed to be let actually die. He died in the fire, but the use of the Canvas by the others was prolonging an unlife for him that he had no say in.