I’D never heard of Bill Nix until one day recently when I stumbled upon a selection of his paintings on display at the old Mark Foy’s building (these days reincarnated as the legal eagle-infested Downing Centre). His one-syllable name rhymes with that of another, very different artist of a different era from Europe, Otto Dix, who was one of the principal dissident artists who visually chronicled the social and political decay of post-World War I Weimar Republic German society, and the scourge of Hitler and the Nazis.

Dix’s 1920 ‘The Skat Players’

Nix’s paintings behind the glass of Liverpool Street Mark Foy’s entrance have a unmistakable gritty realism to them and are of a different ilk, style-wise, to the unglamourised, intended-to-shock, expressionistic and surrealistic paintings of Otto Dix, depicting the grotesque, the deformed and the anguished denizens of interwar Germany. The collection of Nix’s work at Mark Foy’s, also unglamourised, adhere to a single theme, the depiction of work life at the long-disappeared Cockatoo Island shipbuilding industry. Nix’s group portraits of the workers, blue collar, office workers and other employees of Cockatoo Island between 1950 and 1980, contain an intimacy borne of personal experience…the artist worked on the island in the 1960s and 70s first as a errand boy, then apprenticed as a fitter-and-machinist and lastly as a draughtsman.

The artworks on display, all done in oil and charcoal on canvas, are a part of larger collection of Nix’s paintings and drawings entitled ‘The Boys from Cockatoo’, focusing on a range of work activities relating to the shipyard including catching the ferry to work, ship repairing and labouring, union meetings, blacksmith shop, the drawing office, the canteen, etc.

‘The Boys from Cockatoo’ series had its public debut in 2008 with a 20-painting exhibition at the Australian National Maritime Museum, which Nix later expanded on to add new works inspired by his memories of the variety of day-to-day routines undertaken by workers at Cockatoo Island.