When Dr. Kathryn Ko is not operating on a brain, she is painting one.

“It’s the most beautiful thing on earth, hands down,” said Dr. Ko, 59, a neurosurgeon at Kings County Hospital Center in Brooklyn. “The power, the meaning. It’s what we are. And I get to see it alive.”

As a surgeon and a painter, Dr. Ko specializes in the anatomy of the brain and cranium. Her art — whether realistic pieces or the more abstract and conceptual works — springs directly from her 30 years of emergency surgery experience in hospitals in New York City.

When a classical trumpeter from a Russian orchestra took a bad fall during a performance in New York in 2010, Dr. Ko performed emergency surgery at St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx, helping to preserve both his life and his playing career. Afterward, she painted his portrait, complete with the scar across his scalp.

And when she was called to a city morgue to examine the skull of an unidentified man found in the Bronx, she wound up painting it. She has made paintings that show her operating alongside her surgical team and has created a homage to a favorite pneumatic cranial drill. Dr. Ko, who has an acute ear for musical pitch, had noticed that the drill emitted a G sharp when rotating at the proper operating speed. She made a painting of her using the drill and named it “Craniotomyin G Sharp.”