Lucretia Leonard Romey (Lu) filled 103 sketchbooks over a lifetime of traveling to places such as Norway, France, Antarctica, and Alaska with roughly 6,000 watercolor sketches. Almost all of them were unlabeled, without notes about where she had been standing.
Her grandson Max Romey, a watercolor artist and filmmaker in Anchorage, inherited the archive after she died more than a decade ago. Rather than keep the books on a shelf, he set out to find the places in them. He didn’t just want to identify the viewpoints; he wanted to stand in them and paint the same view himself, as he told Art Toolkit in 2023.
Trail Runner put his count at 11 locations as of August 2025. He’s up to roughly 20 now.
“It’s almost kind of scary to think about that at my current pace it is going to take me about 350 years to complete this project,” Romey told Trail Runner.
Lu is the reason he paints. He struggled with words as a child and received a dyslexia diagnosis, but sketchbooks offered an alternative language. “Watercolors and sketching became my refuge and a way to share an idea without someone telling me I misspelled it,” he said.
His grandmother supplied him with examples, mailing him drawings of penguins from Antarctica, he told KEEN.
Romey began the search in 2024 and has been filming it as a series called “My Grandmother’s Sketchbook,” according to the American Trail Running Association. He posts her drawings online and asks viewers to help him work out what he’s looking at. One of his recent videos drew almost 30,000 likes.
What he finds isn’t only the spot; it’s the difference. One of his films follows a sketch Lu made of the Matanuska Glacier and his attempt to recreate the same scene from the same place four decades later with a single page to guide him. His studio’s description of the film says he found a landscape that had changed. Her sketchbooks have turned out to be a record of how much these places shift, which wasn’t her original intention.
Romey works with the same materials she used. Lu did nearly all of her sketching in Strathmore books—the kind sold in craft stores. At the Aiguille du Midi above Chamonix, he painted his version in 2023 of a page she had drawn in 1989.
Romey has a son now, whom he hopes will eventually find something in his sketchbooks the way he found something in Lu’s.
