Date posted: 10-11-04

Editors: You are encouraged to use this story in your publication. Please credit the author and DeKalb News Service as shown. And, please send two tearsheets to: Jim Killam, Department of Communication, Watson Hall, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL 60115.

For source-contact information, contact Jim Killam at jkillam@niu.edu or 815-753-4239.

1,200 words

Cornfield Colossus: George Kapotas' passion covers his yard.

By Dan Patterson
DeKalb News Service

MONROE CENTER -- It's 3 a.m., and George Kapotas can't sleep. Not while there's still space in the yard.

So, in a passion play that runs almost nightly, George is already up for the next day, carving in his wood shop, as his wife sleeps peacefully in the house 50 yards away. He's driven by his work ethic and by his belief that God placed him on Earth to do exactly what he's doing - so he'd better keep doing it.

Seven hours later, Kapotas runs his sandpapery hands over an unfinished table outside the shop. "I'm a workaholic," he says through a thick, Greek accent. Eight hours after he began, he looks forward to 10 more productive hours in the sawdust-littered building where he carves his passion.

Six days a week, Kapotas says, he wakes at 2 a.m. to labor in his shop, Studio 7, and he'll keep at it until as late as 10 p.m. Kapotas' chainsaw setup dominates the garage-sized shop littered with works in progress.

For 10 years George has held this schedule, despite his now-71-year-old body that has begun to fail him. A bad hip forces him to take stiff-legged, cautious steps. He now uses a golf cart to navigate his 12 acres. He eases himself into the seat, careful not to spill his mug of coffee.

He balances the mug on the dash and lights a cigarillo.

"There'll never be anybody else like me. Never," he says between stoking drags.

"Put in here that red thing," he growls to the Mexican landscaper he's hired to help him.

The cart whirs down the asphalt driveway now, red tub in tow, past life-size wooden sculptures of bears, eagles and humans. Kapotas motions toward his dozen or so knee-high wooden mushrooms that sprouting from the rock garden.

He flicks his wrist and maneuvers around the truck-sized fountain with three stone dolphins bathed in a stream of water. He chiseled it.

In the distance rises what Kapotas calls the "world's largest Greek," an "8- or 9-foot" statue carved from solid wood. He carved it.

Past the fountain, he turns onto a brick path and pulls up to a 15-by-12-foot stone chapel. He built it. Three couples have married there since he finished it this year.

Biblical figures surround the chapel on three sides. Hundreds of them silently re-enact the life of Jesus on eight sculpted acres in Kapotas' yard. He turned his passion into full-time work as he had the time later in his life and after an attempt to plant coneflowers in his yard.

Not a one sprouted, and Kapotas took the misfortune as an omen to build a garden fit to please God in his cornfield-bound yard.

The nativity scene, the crucifixion, ascension and all steps in between are played out alongside his 50-yard-long driveway that leads to Kilbuck Road just off Illinois Route 72.

Kapotas started the diorama after thieves broke into his workshop and started a fire that destroyed his old Studio 7 five years ago. A dozen charred carvings stand clustered beneath pine trees in Kapotas' backyard, illustrating where his yard was five years ago. Behind the silhouettes lies open grass, upon which Kapotas will expand his.

Kapotas' life parallels the fall and rise of Studio 7. He left Greece in 1958 for an agricultural scholarship that brought him to Rockford and a year later began a landscaping business with "just a wheelbarrow and one rake."

Within 10 years he had grown the business in Roscoe into a multi-million dollar operation specializing in sod. But a flood destroyed most of business in 1973, forcing him pack up and start over in Texas.

Again he started a business with little more than what he could carry.

"I could not buy a stick of gum for five years," Kapotas explains as he plucks a sprig of basil from the gardens surrounding the statuary. "They call that guts. None of that sissy bulls---. Guts. Nothing stands in my way."

Seventeen years later, in 1990, he was ready to retire from professional landscaping and move back to northern Illinois. He met his second wife, Jeanne, and eventually settled in a well-furnished ranch home outside Monroe Center.

He began to work on his artwork full-time and take orders for projects. Between the projects and his business in Texas, Kapotas accumulated enough money to concentrate solely on his yard and its woody inhabitants.

"He's always in the yard," Jeanne says. "He loves it out there." She sometimes guides visitors through the makeshift museum on shelves in their basement.

Price tags identify the items that are for sale; several of the alabaster sculptures are priced at more than $1,000.

Kapotas sold most of his work during the first five years and put up a few yard decorations, including two totem poles.

The totem poles caught the attention of Gary and Lorraine Graham about four years ago as they cruised the roadside scanning for asparagus.

"He came out on his gold cart and asked us if that was a Buick Roadmaster," Lorraine said, "and he remembered us by our first names from that day on." The Grahams now make the 40-mile trek from Davis as often as they can to help Kapotas plant flowers and maintain the landscaping.

The couple now is now met with bear hugs - Kapotas' trademark greeting - every time they stop by. Kapotas once held a man so tightly that he broke his rib. Then he carved an alabaster hug to apologize.

The Grahams volunteer their time at Kapotas' sanctuary, named "Lil's Acres," for of their love for God and their respect for Kapotas' work.

"It's just beautiful," Lorraine said. "We get goose bumps just like everyone else."

Lorraine attributes her newfound faith to the film "The Passion of the Christ" and to Kapotas' work. Jesus in the film and Kapotas in his work share "tenacity" rarely seen in this world, Lorraine said.

Kapotas now points his ambition toward his latest, grandest project: a 65-feet-tall carving of his wife's praying hands. It will embody the three loves of Kapotas' life.

Such endeavors tax Kapotas' time. He has hired Antelmo Martinez to help with the smaller projects on the grounds, including the maintenance of the $300,000 worth of plants that Kapotas says he keeps.

Martinez, a Mexican immigrant who has been in Illinois for seven years, says Kapotas is a rough man with a heart of gold. Kapotas hired Martinez after Martinez approached him about a job two years ago.

"He's a great man; a hard-working man," Martinez says in hesitant English. Martinez carved wood back in Mexico, but "nothing like this. Maybe one or two faces."

Martinez levels the flowerbed mulch with one rake, finishing up the ring of flowers around the church.

"He's the greatest in the world," Kapotas says of his right-hand man as he rolls by. "Hard worker."

Kapotas carved the figures in front of the church out of his love for God. But 800 bears, 500 eagles, several roadrunners, Daffy Ducks and countless requests have provided the cash-crop carvings Kapotas has needed to fund the undertaking.

His enterprise, he says, has fueled a love for his adopted homeland.

"I love this country, every bit of it. This is the holy land."

"There's no such thing as luck - all blood, guts and sweat," Kapotas says as he coasts the cart to a rest in the gravel before Studio 7, named for his lucky number. He'll finish the day pouring some sand near his driveway and refinishing a few of the older bears he's had around his yard. He hopes to have his yard full within another five years, but would not stop there.

"You have to keep going. What else is there? I never give up."

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