The artists were struggling to feed their families, barely surviving by painting "Lawrence of Arabia" style pieces popular among the soldiers.
The artwork they were showing the Marine was very different. It documented the violence and chaos around them.
"After two or three months of knowing these people, they started bringing in really good paintings, ones that they were not selling in the tourist shops."
The quality and sheer volume of the pieces motivated Mr Brownfield to make an offer: "Let me take this to the US and try and exhibit it, try and sell it."
Smuggling
After months of dialogue, the artists agreed to take the risk.
"It took me quite some time to build up enough trust that they would bring in these gallery pieces and ask me to take them to the US. It probably took seven or eight months before they were willing to trust me to do that."
This was no mean feat. Iraqis working with Americans have been labelled traitors by the insurgency and many have been killed.
...
Pride of place has been given to a 25-panel painting by Mohammed al-Hamdany. It is called Laylat al-Nar or The Night of Fire.
"The series Night of Fire gets its name from the time of the invasion in 2003, when everyone in the US and the Western media was calling it the Shock and Awe campaign," explains Mr Brownfield.
The vast majority of us cannot know the deep personal hell one must go through when all that is their home is destroyed by war. The former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Palestine/Israel, Iraq, and others are places of haunted memory for generations to come. The art expressing this kind of suffering is assayed in human lives and beyond value.
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