Between 1966 and 1969, Jim Dine had briefly stopped painting and concentrated on making sculptures as well as unusual abstract works, using objects such as color charts and fabric. Also at this time, Dine was writing poetry, and pursuing printmaking and music. The poetry and graphic work helped Dine move into a new painting vocabulary and acheive a new lyricism in the work of 1969.

Painting Pleasures is part of a well-known group such as Betty (1969) and Hercules Bellville (1969) which exploit color and collage in an optimistic and celebratory manner. In Painting Pleasures, Dine identifies each color with the word for that color, covering the canvas in a random, all-over manner. Dine has always been a great collagist, and in Painting Pleasures, color exists as an object on the canvas together with a clam shell and rag.

What Dine is doing in these canvases is exhibiting his flair for abstraction, what John Russell called a form of "art criticism" lodged within the work, coupled with Dine's ever-increasing rage for context. The content for Dine had to be made up not just of the presentation of the real, but the way the real flickers back and forth between the space of illusion and the spectator's non- solid space...While Dine finally reaches a decision in this period to withdraw the all-too-real objects from their impinging upon the canvas, as a mere device growing thin, these works are joyful late reminders of what the artist can do in the fusion of canvas and assorted implements and shards. They are still odes to elementary things, as Pablo Neruda wrote an ode to a sock or an ode to an artichoke: hymns to the miscellaneous, as if hypnotized by the present, not the future so adored by the Surrealists (D. Shapiro, Jim Dine, New York 1981, p. 39).