2D Game dev and Java. Other possibilities than OpenGL?

I recently started to program some basic OpenGL stuff in Java, but OpenGL and DirectX is too much to handle and to understand for me and I'm getting bored really fast.

Now I am wondering if there are other possibilities than OpenGL (or DirectX) to make simple 2D graphics and to get started in Game Development, even if its limited. I will probably use OpenGL anyway when I am more experienced.

Answer

There is also the library Slick which provides the most common features for developing 2D games (images, animations, sounds, gameloop...). It has the advantage over the Java 2D library to be more specific to video games as it includes collisions checking and a physics engine.