In a Strip District garage, two mechanics repair expensive cars, barely dressed women on wall calendars wear beguiling smiles and the Celtic punk music of Flogging Molly loudly throbs.

This scene at the German Motor Werks looks typical until you notice that murals cover two walls, a large still life of an oil can hangs in the waiting room and, over in a corner, the artist who created those works, Colin Noonan, is painting at an easel.

The 28-year-old artist, who lives in East Liberty, is finishing a panoramic view of Pittsburgh as seen from St. John's Evangelical Lutheran Cemetery on Buente Street in the North Side's Spring Hill neighborhood.

Along with half a dozen other paintings, the panorama goes on display this week at the Coca Cafe, 3811 Butler St., Lawrenceville, and will be on view at least until September. Other works feature urban scenes of Pittsburgh, such as alleys, the Martin Luther King Jr. East Busway and a pickup soccer game under the floodlights of Schenley Park at night. The opening reception is at the restaurant at 7 p.m. Friday.Why a garage instead of a garret? Eleven years ago, Noonan, then 17, landed a summer job there through Millard Landis, father of his friend, Chris.

In subsequent summers, he sandwiched stints at the garage between his education at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he earned a bachelor's degree in art in 2003.

The artist knows far more about art than internal combustion engines but he found beauty among the industrial racks, floor jacks and carburetor hoses.

Actor David Conrad, a customer of German Motor Werks, met Noonan in 2005. The actor purchased the artist's painting of a customized Volkswagen engine topped with a red mechanic's rag. That still life was among 151 artworks Conrad donated earlier this year to his alma mater, the Kiski School in Westmoreland County. The collection was valued at $300,000.

Conrad bought several other paintings by Noonan, including a still life of a Benadryl package, another that shows a floor jack and a third that portrays a green utility light.

Noonan saw a new kind of light in 2001 while participating in an exchange program in Australia through Pratt Institute. He became fond of painting landscapes while working outdoors.

For most of 2001, Noonan studied conceptual art at Southern Cross University in Lismore, a beach town in Australia's New South Wales. He had always dreamed of seeing Australia.

"I wanted to pull the rip cord on this dream continent," Noonan said, adding that Australia's luscious light and colors beckoned him to paint outdoors.

"The earth is red; the sky is low to the ground and big. There are large cow paddocks and pastures. There's salt in the air."

Back in Pittsburgh in 2006, Joe Greif, a mechanic at German Motor Werks, showed Noonan a view of Pittsburgh from St. John's Evangelical Lutheran Cemetery.

Starting in 2007, Noonan visited the graveyard often, stopping to pay his respects to members of the Jacob Kolb family, who rest atop a hill. Then, he anchored his 4-foot-tall, 6-foot-wide canvas to the ground with sage and thyme garden markers and began working under the hot sun.

"The bugs would just completely eat me alive and fly into the painting," Noonan recalled. "The painting was just like a giant sail. I felt like I might as well have been like a big clipper ship. You could hear the cracking of the tension of the board."

Eventually, he had to use eight garden markers to anchor the canvas. Noonan found working outdoors on the primed, gessoed white panel was physically demanding.

"You're on top of this hill. It's just this blinding square. You're picking up so much reflection. I was afraid it would fly away or drop into the grass."

He figured that artists such as Claude Monet, who painted scenes of haystacks, encountered similar obstacles, such as heat and insects. At the end of a cemetery session, Noonan would strap the panorama onto the roof of a VW pickup.

The experience of working outdoors gave him a newfound respect for the process of creating art.

"When you see a painting the next time, you think about not just the picture but its making."

Back in the garage, which he calls his "romper room," the artist chats amiably with mechanic Nathan McCullough, who often nudges him back to the easel.

"Sometimes, he just needs a little encouragement," McCullough said.