Rex Dixon was born in 1939 in London, England and was evacuated in 1940 during the war from London to Letchworth, Hertfordshire. He completed his secondary education and proceeded to a series of peripatetic jobs from 1957 and 1966 which included being a clerk at the Provident Mutual Life Association, a coal weigher, a labourer, waiter and hotel worker in Spain. He entered the School of Art, Newton Abbot in South Devon from 1966 to 1968.  He followed up his training at Newton Abbey with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1971 at Stourbridge College of Art, West Midlands, UK and completed  a School of Art Education Teaching Diploma at Birmingham Polytechnic in 1972.

He was Visual Arts Officer at Midlands Art Centre, Birmingham from 1972-1977, organizing exhibitions, lectures, films and seminars on all aspects of contemporary art. He taught painting as a full time lecturer on the B.A. degree course at the New University of Ulster, Belfast, prior to teaching in the painting department at the Edna Manley School for the Visual Arts, Jamaica from 1985 to 1999. He gave up his education position after teaching full time for twelve years in Jamaica, to devote himself to painting in 1999 and since them has followed no other profession that than of  artist and painter.

He has held numerous one-person exhibitions in Kingston and abroad and his paintings are in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Jamaica, Caribbean Development Bank, The University of the West Indies. Jamaica  and in numerous other private collections.  He is currently represented by the James Wray Gallery in Belfast, Northern Ireland and Softbox Gallery in Port of Spain, Trinidad.

His work is featured in several films among them Seventeen Colours and a Sitar that features the parallels between the work of Dixon and  Trinidadian musician Mungal Patasar.

Since 1995 he has travelled extensively with his wife Professor Patricia Mohammed, within the Caribbean,  to The Netherlands, Spain, Canada, USA, Namibia, Japan and the United Kingdom, experiences which have continued to feed back into his paintings. He moved to Trinidad 2001 and has a studio at his residence in Maracas Valley, St Joseph. He currently distributes his year between a cottage in Northern Ireland and his house and studio in  Trinidad. His works directly onto the canvas in a gestural abstract style with figurative overtones. 

He is co-author with Patricia Mohammed and contributor of drawings to the book Travels with a Husband, Hansib, United Kingdom, 2016  and has also published Jane Eyre: Caribbean Drawings, Hansib, United Kingdom and Maracas Valley Studio Productions, 2019 (Both books available as E copies on Amazon.