EZ graphics programming?

[foodog]

Suppose there was a rusty C programmer (moi) who'd never created
non-commandline apps.  This same person inexplicably felt a need to
write a graphics app that could be compared to a "checkers" game: lay
out a grid of particular dimensions, put some tokens on it, move them
around with a mouse (and some minor logic associated w/ those
activities).  
It'd be nice to be able to use .jpg, .gif, .png etc. images to make it
purty.

Any suggestions on the least-painful graphics toolkit to look at?  Qt,
GTK, ...?
I started looking at Pygame (for Python) and quickly realized that I
don't really want to go to the trouble of learning a new language; I
think in C.

Thanks much,
Steve