i´m currently reading (and enjoying) this book by martin gayford. it´s a quick/easy read and i have always felt very attracted to lucian freud. i started the book before he died but it had been left on my bedside table until i saw the news of his death when i grabbed it again. and it grabbed me, i´m finding a resonance with my own practice and beliefs about art making. the paragraph below was of particular interest to me:

"For LF, everything he depicts is a portrait. His peculiarity in the history of art is that he is aware of the individuality of absolutely everything. He has completely un-Platonic sensibility, to put it in philosophical terms. In his work, nothing is generalized, idealized or generic. He insists that the most humble and - to most people - nondescript items have their own characteristics.

Even in the case of a manufactured item, such as a shirt, he finds that one example will be slightly unlike another, a hanging thread perhaps, a different turn of the collar. A year ago, when he was painting a still life of four eggs, he discovered that on close examination each showed distinct personal traits. So the still life turned into a sort of group portrait."