Grandson Repaints 6,000 Sketches at Grandma's Exact Spots

Max Romey's grandmother Lucretia left him an extraordinary puzzle: 6,000 watercolor sketches from places like Norway, Antarctica, and Alaska, almost none of them labeled.

Instead of storing the 103 sketchbooks on a shelf, the Anchorage artist and filmmaker decided to find every single location. He didn't just want to identify where she stood, he wanted to paint the same view himself.

So far, he's found about 20 spots. At his current pace, the project will take 350 years to complete.

His grandmother Lu is the reason Max paints at all. Diagnosed with dyslexia as a child, he struggled with words but found freedom in sketchbooks.

"Watercolors and sketching became my refuge and a way to share an idea without someone telling me I misspelled it," he said. Lu encouraged him by mailing drawings of penguins from Antarctica and other far-flung places.

Max started the search in 2024 and turned it into a film series called "My Grandmother's Sketchbook." He posts her drawings online and asks viewers to help identify the mysterious locations, with one recent video drawing almost 30,000 likes.

When he tracked down the Matanuska Glacier in Alaska, he discovered something unexpected. Four decades after Lu painted it, the landscape had dramatically changed.

Her sketchbooks, created simply to capture beauty, had accidentally become a record of how much the world is shifting. The comparison between past and present tells a story she never intended to document.

Sunny's Take

Max paints with the same materials his grandmother used: Strathmore sketchbooks from ordinary craft stores. At the Aiguille du Midi above Chamonix, he recreated her 1989 sketch in 2023, standing where she once stood.

Now he has a son of his own. He hopes that one day his child will find something meaningful in his sketchbooks, the way he found connection and purpose in Lu's.

The project connects three generations through art, preserving not just landscapes but love passed down through watercolor and paper.