De Bruycker was featured in an editorial in the Hamptons “Beach” magazine where he stated:
“Colors resonate psychologically. I tend to use colors that I associate with inner life. From the sensual to the melancholic, from a fragile beauty to mourning. I mean it has to say something about the human experience.”
De Bruycker painted with what he termed “internal emotional colors” allowing the viewer to have a visceral and emotional response when viewing his paintings in person. De Bruycker’s paintings are oil and mixed media, including asphalt, gesso and cobalt drier on canvas.
“My paintings are not so much conceptually driven rather they are emotive and fluid, liquid even. Color fields and forms are negotiated intuitively, responsive to what I like to call a painterly logic that is unique to each painting. If the actions of painting start off rather detached, somewhat random, they become increasingly more specific and sparse towards the completion of the painting. It’s a process of fine-tuning where I try to capitalize on the few lucid moments that occur during the process. I try to infuse or charge the painting with emotional content through the very acts of painting.
Throughout the years I have searched for a tactile but fragile beauty, a kind of dangerous beauty, a fleeting one. Democritus Junior lists beauty as a cause for melancholy in his eclectic scholarly work ‘The Anatomy of Melancholy’. This tragic beauty interests me. A few years ago I entered my studio in Nicaragua and on the tile floor lay dead a splendid Cocoa Mort Blue butterfly, her body consumed by ants. I gasped, overwhelmed by both the beauty and the tragedy of the event. This occurrence provided me with much more than a pretext to give expression to my sentiments and preoccupations. I think I’ve been trying to capture that moment of gasping ever since in my paintings, and in a way that is consistent with the intuitive process-oriented approach to painting that I favor”.