Pietro Spadafina was born in Cerignola (Foggia) in September 1947. His family directed him towards classical studies and, at the same time, Pietro indulged his passion for painting, without much planning. As a child he dreams of becoming a pilot and, after high school, he obtains a pilot's license; but a sudden strong myopia (later disappeared) forced him to abandon the project. In the seventies he moved to Turin and graduated in Architecture. After acquiring the technical tools, he realizes that simply reproducing reality does not satisfy him: thanks to an intuition, Spadafina creates the Active Drawing method, a technique that leads him to draw with his eyes closed, going beyond the limits imposed by the sheets and from the canvases. In those years he produced numerous works and exhibited in Italy (Rome, Turin, Naples, Venice) and abroad (New York, Buenos Aires, Basel, Tokyo). Among the masters of reference of his style, dreamlike and rational at the same time, there are Tamara De Lempicka, Salvador Dalì, Giorgio De Chirico, Gustav Klimt.
In the meantime, Pietro Spadafina begins to teach courses on Active Drawing, which he also uses from a therapeutic point of view, especially with drug addicts in recovery communities. In 2007 he encloses the theory of Active Drawing in his book "The interpretation of the scribble". During the Turin period he opened a literary café-art gallery and founded and directed two periodicals of art and culture. In the nineties he returned to his land, Puglia, where he decided to live in the countryside. Pietro meets the disease as fate, but does not stop, overcomes it, continues in his pictorial research and, pushed by his wife, also writes two novels: "The man of the magpie" (2006) and "The price of the omen" (2007 ). In 2009 he organized a traveling exhibition on the theme of illegal hiring suffered by migrants in the Apulian countryside. In 2021 he is present at the collective exhibition organized within the "Troisi Poeta Massimo" exhibition, in Castel dell'Ovo in Naples and in Procida.