Direct Graphics Programming

As an overview of what I'm trying to do is simply make a program that will display an 32 bit image on the screen. In game programming this is a simple process by using an existing library to render an image to a window. What I've been trying to learn the past few weeks is Assembly to attempt to do this as a first step in creating a minimalistic operating system. I know a LITTLE bit such as the main registers AX, BX, or EAX for 32 bit and RAX for 64 bit, and etc. I understand the concepts of the CPU and RAM, but am having a VERY difficult time understanding things such as peripherals and how to interact with them through interrupts. This seems to be the most vital part to understand, at least to me.

I have a concrete understanding of how to use C\C++, but I don't know all of the possible functions and commands I could. Mainly what I'm looking for right now is to write pixels\images to the screen without the need of an operating system running. I assume that with this I'd need to make my own little mini video card driver. I'm pretty sure this can be done with C and possibly some inline Assembly. Just as a heads up, my IDE\Compiler is Visual Studio 2010:Visual C++ 2010.

how to write an os - Google Search
Pretty soon, you'll come across how to write drivers for your new OS.

Yes you can still treat video memory as just a dumb block of memory you can write to from the CPU.
But if you want real performance, then you need to know that pretty much any graphics card from the last 10+ years has a GPU (possibly quite a few), which are really capable at bashing out those pixels at a far higher rate than you could from the CPU.

I'm think this is commonly done using VESA:

VESA - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Eg, I'd guess that's how the GRand Unified Bootloader presents an splash screen, which you could look at the C source for that:

GNU GRUB - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (FSF)

google 'how to learn bare metal programming' . and displaying a 32bit graphic image is not a first step in learning to program an OS, its arguably the last step.