Is there a cairo like surface for the screen without the window hassle

[Antoon Pardon]

I need to have a program construct a number of designs. Of course I can directly
use a pfd surface and later use a pdf viewer to check. But that becomes rather
cumbersome fast. But if I use a cairo-surface for on the screen I suddenly have
to cope with expose events and all such things I am not really interested in.

So does someone know of a package that provides a cairo like surface but that
would take care of the events in a rather straight forward matter, so that my
program could make it's design in a window on the screen just as if it is
designing it in a pdf file.

-- 
Antoon Pardon