He says he’s homeless, recovering from addiction and sleeping rough outside parliament in the hope someone will pay attention to his plight. Julian Delia met Roderick Brincat for a chat. 

Roderick Brincat just wants to be listened to.

That’s why the 33-year-old homeless painter and former heroin user has chosen to live at a spot right around the corner from parliament.

For three months, he says, he endured travelling between Valletta and Qormi, sleeping wherever he could.

Eventually, he decided to make the entrance to the capital city a temporary home in a desperate attempt to get his cry for help noticed.

“I have problems I need to take care of as fast as possible,” he says, as he opens up about his troubles on an overcast morning next to his bold and colourful paintings.

“I can’t wait six months, or a year. It’s why I’m here, in Valletta, to try to do something.

“I am sleeping right across the street from parliament so they know, so maybe they’ll listen to me and do something.”

Brincat, it turns out, has been waiting for social housing for 12 years.

'I deserve a decent life'

“I feel like I deserve a decent life, I’m not even asking for much,” he says.

“Just a bed to sleep in so I can avoid issues with my scoliosis, a shower to wash myself in instead of finding random basins. That is, unless I get kicked out of public latrines, which I also had to deal with recently.”

As he shares his past battle with substance abuse, his passion for painting and his hopes for the future, Brincat confides that one of his biggest problems is that people assume he is “just some sort of junkie”. He had, in fact, been struggling with heroin for over a decade, although now professes to have been clean for at least five months.

“I almost lost my legs because of how much I’d been using… now I’ve managed to stop. I had only gone back to using it because I was in a desperate place after a relationship of three-and-a-half years went sour.”

He was only 20 when he first encountered heroin.

His bubbly character and solitary nature, he feels, led to episodes of bullying throughout his adolescence.

“I’m a sensitive person. If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t be able to paint and express what I feel. Eventually, I stopped using drugs, thank God.”

What had made him resort to escapism?

It was isolation and a measure of social anxiety, he explains.

“I avoided friends and ended up being alone all the time. Unfortunately, I met a woman who was a heroin user. I was an idiot and decided to try it… I’m just glad I’m out.

“Now, I just want to avoid mixing with structures where addicts are piled up on top of each other.”

Reflecting on the times he had reached out for help, he claims his problems only got worse inside the organisations that help recovering addicts. Being around people who had the same issues just amplified what he was already going through.

“It’s like a wheel that never stops; then, once you get out, you end up doing twice as badly.

“I went to Mount Carmel two years ago because I felt like I wasn’t doing well and I was smoking cannabis, which I don’t do anymore. They threw me in with the addicts and I left that place injecting heroin.”

I am sleeping right across the street from parliament so they know, so maybe they’ll listen to me and do something

Most people do heal in those places he adds. “I don’t want to criticise them. For me personally, though, it felt like I was treated like a little kid.

“I can’t stand being told exactly what to do, I can’t accept that. I just wanted to leave,” he continues, an audible hint of dismay in his voice.

Eyes cast towards the ground, he also talks about how on one occasion, a fellow recovering addict at the San Blas shelter kicked him in the head several times.

“The staff took action straight away, and the person was kicked out.”

He also recalls how his mother kicked him out of their family home four times, the last time being one too many – Brincat has severed ties with his family except for his twin brother.

In 2006, he was sentenced to three years in jail after pleading guilty to committing an armed robbery and breaching his bail conditions on a pending case.

His art is now the most important thing in his life

“My artwork comes before anything else right now… I need to see how I’m going to fix the issues in my life and that’s it,” he adds.

An artist intent on developing his own style and direction, Brincat describes his love for the medium, an interest which he feels he was born with.

His work is inspired, he says, by what he sees in his day-to-day life.

“It depends on the morning’s mood and the people I see walking and going about their day.”

Throughout the interview he proudly displays an unfinished painting, and explains how the piece came about. “There was this one guy who seemed a bit sad, so I added black. There was this beautiful woman who was wearing bright purple colours, so I threw in purple. I am always inspired by people.

“As for the face, I wanted him to sort of yell, kind of like The Scream,” he says, referring to Edvard Munch’s ubiquitous series of paintings.

While a homeless artist is not a common sight, throughout his most recent struggle with being homeless he has met at least 50 others who sleep out on the streets, he says.

“For example, at night I sometimes meet a Bulgarian man whom I knew in Mount Carmel. He gives me food whenever I don’t have any, and I do the same for him.”

A 2019 study on homelessness in Malta, commissioned by the European Social Policy Network, had highlighted rising property prices and the lack of a corresponding increase in wages as two of the main factors contributing to social and material exclusion.

Brincat acknowledges that finding in his own reality. “I used to rent a home for €800 a month. I was sharing the place with another person, who happens to be the main reason why I don’t want to share accommodation with someone else if possible.

“After two years, the rent soared to €1,500 a month. How can I pay that? Where does one get that money?” Brincat says with exasperation.

“You can’t pay that, not even if you are working three jobs! I was working and selling a few paintings here and there, maybe making a few hundred euros on the side every now and then. How else could I pay for other basics, like food, water, bills?”

'There are junkies'

He has two aspirations now: to find a place to live and for people to invest in his art – he is selling paintings for whatever he can get.

He hopes that someone will take action and that others will find as much meaning in his art as he finds whenever someone connects with his work.

Meanwhile, two police officers were seen approaching Roderick on Saturday and urging him to go to a shelter they had previously suggested, especially with winter looming.

He replied: “I don’t want to go there. There are junkies.”