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In artist Angela Berkson's hands, encaustic becomes a milky window on form and pattern.

"It's a really cool medium," Berkson says. "It's transparent, but has a physical, tactile presence. It's like skin."

Encaustic is beeswax and dry pigment melted together. Berkson takes the gooey substance and works it over paper, embedding into it collage elements such as tracing and tissue papers, acetate, targets, maps and thread.

As the encaustic is absorbed into the materials' fiber, Berkson adds imagery - shapes drawn in graphite and litho crayon. She goes back to the encaustic, moving some around, melting some off.

The result is complex and fascinating. Viewed through different densities of wax, images fade in and out, design elements pop and color changes intensity.

It has body, and mystery. You want reach out and touch it.

"I'm never sure what it will do," says Berkson, an Albuquerque native who studied in Los Angeles, Santa Fe and Austin, and interned with noted encaustic artist Rachel Friedberg in New York City. "There are chance elements. I don't have total control."

In her new work showing at Exhibit/208 in Nob Hill, Berkson did something very different.

She's known as an abstract artist. Her previous encaustics were built around geometric shape and graphic design. Targets and maps were departure points for unexpected color schemes.

Then Berkson began seeing figures emerging from the curves in a road map. "I didn't want to work with figures," she says. "I'm abstract. It would be going down a whole other path to have recognizable objects."

Berkson gave in. "I wanted to see where it would take me," she says. "But I was very nervous, a wreck."

In the new pieces, female figures in one- and two-piece swimsuits mingle with circles, on paper targets and drawn by Berkson.

She uses the figures as design elements only. "I'm not trying to tell a story," she says. "It's purely visual. You can make your own associations."

Spoken like a true abstract artist.

Berkson's figures blend seamlessly into the graphic compositions.

In "Target Toss," "Target Leap" and "Target Jump," figures stretch over the circles of a target toward ball-like images. Legs appear in blocks of ochre, blue and magenta, creating an edgy symmetry.

"White Bend" is a beautiful composition, a nude body reaching and disappearing across a color divide.

"Mother and Child" perfectly blends the abstract with the figurative and "Dirty Reach" is a flawless composition, rich in color and form.

Berkson brings a smile with "She's Embedded," a pure abstract that forces us to search for the female figure we've come to know.

She's not there.

But we keeping looking, through veils of encaustic, at Berkson's wonderful images.

At the top of my list of favorite art shows is the semiannual exhibit of new work by the developmentally disabled artists at Very Special Arts.

That show, at the VSA North Fourth Art Center, is next month, and I'll be there.

This month, the VSA is showing work by instructors in the VSA's Day Arts Program.

The work they do with the VSA student artists is simply amazing. It's a treat to see these talented painters and sculptors step out of the shadows.

There's Karen Davisson's monumental metal installation "Of Flesh and Spirit," Laurence Wellborn's spiritual painting "Self Remembering," Wendy Zollinger's accomplished oil "Refugee Road" and Bill Morrison's brilliant crayon abstract "4 Years of Time."

There are many more, not to be missed.

Like all VSA work, it's excellent and priced to sell.