This painting toys with the instability of language and the traps of first impressions. At a glance, the all-caps declaration A TERRIBLE BEAST frames the timid dog in front of you as something ferocious, but the animal’s nervous posture immediately counters that claim. Stepping closer, another phrase appears: to project onto. With that small shift, the narrative flips. The dog becomes just a poor creature made to carry whatever we place upon it. The definition of “terrible” then reads not as a “terrifying” beast, but “a terrible choice of beast”, a poor choice of animal, that we project emotions and thoughts onto. Through misdirection and misreading, the work exposes how easily language can betray what we see, and how quickly we become unreliable narrators of our own interpretations.