Caroline Mousseau, a student in the University of Guelph’s master of fine art program, has been selected as this year’s winner of the Joseph Plaskett postgraduate award in painting.

The $30,000 award will allow Mousseau to spend six months in Europe after her graduate studies to paint and to view artistic works in museums.

She holds a bachelor of fine art from Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Now completing her master’s degree, she is investigating how the process of slow consideration is fruitful ground for abstraction in an immediate world.

Mousseau will be based in Berlin and plans to visit the Netherlands, Norway and Denmark to view art. She is especially interested in seeing folk art next to original Modernist works such as those of the Bauhaus and De Stijl.

Canadian artist Joseph Plaskett created the Joe Plaskett Foundation in 2004 to give young Canadian painters the opportunity to live, travel and create artwork in Europe. The award recognizes exceptional emerging Canadian painters in a graduate program.

In choosing Mousseau as the winner of this year’s prize, jury members said they were impressed by Mousseau’s technical mastery and her deconstruction of the abstract expressionist brushstroke through deliberate gestures.