Wally Hedrick has been called "the quintessential funk artist." Yet, during an interview, he preferred to call himself a "politician." At his small studio in Bodega, California, several huge all-black canvases were propped up against the walls a protest, he said, against American military actions. One of the canvases had a tiny Iraqi flag in the middle of it.

Hedrick, who looks kind of like Santa Claus, with blue twinkly eyes and a long white beard, said that the FBI came calling recently, just to ask a few questions. "They figured out pretty quickly I was harmless and they left," Hedrick said. "I told them I was a veteran."

Hedrick, 74, who was in the Korean War, has often responded to world events with his art. During the '60s, he made a series of black paintings as a protest against the Vietnam War. He even created an 11-square-foot black room, complete with door -- another protest against the war.

The Bodega artist, who attended the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) in the '50s, was at the center of the Beat movement. Hedrick's friends included poet Allen Ginsberg, as well as artists David Park, Elmer Bischoff, Bruce Conner and Joan Brown. He helped start the famous 6 Gallery in San Francisco, where Ginsberg first read "Howl," with Kerouac in the audience. Hedrick was married to artist Jay DeFeo, and he was living with her when she created her monumental "The Rose."

His own work, primarily painting, has been exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Oakland Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Modern Art, the Richmond Art Center and many other venues. He had a one-person show at San Francisco's M.H. de Young Museum when he was only 27 years old. He and his then wife, Jay DeFeo, were included in the "Sixteen Americans," a major exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1959.

Hedrick has three pieces up at the di Rosa Preserve: "Red Boots at the Brown Bag Corral" (1980) -- located near the living room ceiling in the house, near the balcony; "The Tree of Noledge" (1992), located in a hallway near the master bedroom of the house "$18.00 Giant Power Heidelberg Electric Belt" (1973), located in the main gallery.

Hedrick has employed a variety of styles in his work, and Paul Klee has been considered an early influence. But Hedrick said he felt a strong affinity to the Dadaists, especially Marcel Duchamp; many critics have called Hedrick most essentially a conceptualist.

The artist divides his work into three categories: political, sexual and religious. Critics have also noted Hedrick’s use of "appropriated images" in his art. His paintings are often raw and confrontational. But Hedrick said he had no intention to shock the viewer with his sexually graphic "Red Boots in the Brown Bag Corral." "It's real -- but I know Rene (di Rosa) put it upstairs by the balcony so that little kids wouldn't see it," Hedrick said.

His painting "$18.00 Giant Power Heidelberg Electric Belt" is classed as an "appropriated image," not unlike Duchamp's ready-mades. Hedrick photographed the Heidelberg Belt advertisement from an old catalog, then projected the image onto a canvas and painstakingly reproduced it.

The advertisement promises that the belt can do almost everything for the wearer, providing "healing, vitalizing power, health, strength, superb manliness, youthful vigor.…"

"It is this absolute belief in technology," Hedrick said.

Like Duchamp's ready-mades, Hedrick's appropriated images have not always been well received. "It wasn't that I was criticized for them," Hedrick said. "They just didn't take them seriously."

Yet Hedrick has never courted the Art Establishment. When he and Jay DeFeo were invited to the opening of the prestigious "Sixteen Americans" at the New York Museum of Modern Art, they declined.

Hedrick said he had no interest in the "Art Bizz" then and has no interest in it now. Asked when his career really started to take off, Hedrick let loose with a big laugh: "Oh, maybe next year."

I spoke with Hedrick at his studio on August 16, 2002. What follows are excerpts from our conversation.

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