negative space

I have never been good at not including negative space, even white space, in my artwork. For one thing, I like the clean edge left by emphasizing the negative space around an object rather than imposing an outline on the subject. That's my adulthood answer.

My childhood answer is that my art teacher through school, who, I might add, was on par with Mother Teresa and Bernadette Peters, always said, "Color in all the white!" And I tried. However, paper is big, so it was ultimately very difficult and traumatic.

I've even won awards for paintings that consisted of about fifty percent negative space, simply because I got tired of painting the subject and just washed the whole thing with dark blue or something.

Now that I'm a little more philosophical, I have grown to appreciate what negative space says. I think it's why I like Sudoku. Now, the easiest few levels of Sudoku I usually solve number by number, mentally highlighting rows and columns and putting the number in the space left. However, in the harder Sudoku puzzles, I have to use information I don't have to solve the puzzle, which is far more interesting. The logic is still there--I'm not guessing--but I have to think in combinations and possibilities and in numbers I don't have yet.

I wonder what this means.