I'm obsessed with the idea of post-game Alicia finding a style of art that's entirely her own and yet has a little bit of her family in it. She paints in symbolism, like her father, but she does not create elaborate parables or fantastic creatures like he does. They are realistic things, grounded things, like her mother.
She paints a scorched, destroyed forest blooming with flowers and titles it "Hope". A rose dripping with blood is "Love". She captures ephemeral feelings with the kind of bittersweet beauty that is mixed with pain and longing, because she knows firsthand that love and loss cannot be separated from each other.
She almost never paints people. When she does, they are the same few faces again and again - a man with a metal arm. A woman with a scar across her face, and a woman with tattoos below her eye. A weathered man with a white streak in his hair. People have asked her who they might be, but she refuses to name them.
(The paintings with her lost friends are among her happiest paintings, as she captures them in moments that they never got to experience. She paints them in little moments of joy and feels her heart bleed further at the what-could-have-been.)
She never paints Canvases with living people because she knows what it is like to be at the mercy of an uncaring god. She writes memoirs and letters about how the beings within Canvases are their own sentient lives and deserve more thought given to them. Creating life is a heavy responsibility that should be treated with the appropriate gravitas.
She only ever signs her paintings "Maelle".
